


The Lay of the Man in Red

by penitence_road



Category: Fate/Zero, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms, The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Multi, Pretentious Greek references, longfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 12:10:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/pseuds/penitence_road
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waver Velvet lived a long and eventful life, and once it was over, he wasn’t expecting anything but a glorious eternity as a member of the Ionioi Hetairoi.  That was before Morpheus vanished and the desert started getting—weird.  Now it’s gone, leaving only a handful of survivors, and only one question remains: is Waver Velvet a bad enough dude to save the Dream King?</p><p>A Fate/Zero + Sandman crossover.  Characters and warnings to be added as they appear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Reality Marble

"Strange, isn't it?"  
  
"Hah, even in the desert outside time I find new things!"  Alexander lifted the relic up into golden sunlight, admiring it.  
  
"But what is it?" Hephaestion asked, leaning closer on his spear as the king brushed sand off of the elegant curve of metal and turned it over to examine the smaller interlocking pieces joined to the back.  
  
"So cunningly made..." Alexander mused, broad fingers gripping the base and watching intently as a peg on the device retracted inward when he turned the wave-shaped piece.  
  
"Maybe it's like a puzzle box from Egypt, with treasure inside," offered the still-kneeling scout who'd found the item to begin with.  
  
"I've never seen the like in all my travels.  Go and get my wizard; he might have an idea."  
  
"Yes, my king!"  
  
That was how Waver found Rider and several of his generals fiddling with an everyday door handle.  An unusual incident, to be sure, but such a small one that it was quickly forgotten in both the untrackable resumed normalcy and the far stranger events that were to follow.  
  
(Lysimachus kept the doorknob, though.  He said all of the king's treasures should have their minders, and one never knew where one might find a door in need of opening.)  


* * *

  
“What do you make of it, Calanus?”  
  
So behested, the sage turned his gaze out over the dunes, surveying the whorls of color in the sand, ribboning spring green and pale purple and a particularly eye-searing pink, all laid alongside bands of pure white and deepest black.  At his side, Ptolemy waited patiently.  
  
Calanus crouched down, bare sword laid across his knees, and squirmed his toes thoughtfully in the lavender grains beneath his feet.  Reaching out, he scooped up a handful of the dark sand, bringing it close to his face.  A moment later he looked up, letting the ebon granules stream out of his fingers.  
  
“You don’t think of sand as having a scent, usually,” he observed.  
  
Ptolemy shook his head, responding wryly.  “If it has one, I have never noticed it past the stink of an army at march through the desert heat.”  He gestured eloquently towards the hammered white disc of the sun overhead.  
  
“But that sand smells of crushed jamun berries.”  
  
Ptolemy stroked his beard.  
  
“Fermenting?”  
  
Calanus grinned at the obliquely hopeful tone, and jerked a thumb out at the multicolored tableau.  
  
“You first.”  
  
The old general sighed remorsefully.  “I shall tell Alexander the sand’s temptation is an empty one.  Perhaps the next oasis will be more kind.”  
  
The Indian stood, shouldering his dark blade, the tattoo on his chest bright and distinct in the sunlight.  He shrugged philosophically.  
  
“We’re wanderers, my friend.  We might as well enjoy the change of scenery.  Anyway, what could there be to hurt us here?”

 

* * *

 

  
“It’s past the perimeter!  Stop it!”  
  
“Surround it!  Run it down!”  
  
A towering bear sculpted in branches and leaves, the monster roared as arrows rained into its flanks, but like an animal in frenzied rage ran on, cracking and brown in the desert heat.  Oxyathres pelted after it, spear in hand, breaking right with the other lancers as Perdiccas, drawing his bow again, yelled orders.  The cursed thing was fast, too fast; it barreled over an unfortunate guard in its way, leaving the man moaning and clutching the bleeding wounds left by the vicious rake of claw-like thorns.  
  
“Turn it!  Run it to the right!”  
  
Perdiccas shouted from behind him, holding his fire as the infantry surged forward.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Leonnatus leaping alongside the beast’s other side but then they were on the monster and all he could focus on was driving it along with slashes and prods.  
  
Clear fluid splashed along the edges of their blades, filling the air with the scent of sap; the creature swiped outward with one massive paw, but finally turned towards Leonnatus, who dashed a line in the sand behind him with one foot and drew his sword and dagger, dropping into a readied position and watching the approaching enemy with deadly intent.  
  
It came on, bellowing, and the camp raised a cheer as the slim soldier moved in a blur, severing the plant-beast’s paw in a single swing and ducking beneath it, rolling back to his feet to cut a long slash along its shoulder.  He danced back from a retaliatory blow, shorter blade darting into the thing’s remaining paw; as it jerked back he scored another gash along the underside of its leg.  
  
“Do not drop your guard!” Oxyathres shouted to the men around him as they spread out around the confrontation.  “It will not hold the engagement!  Once it’s injured enough, it—“  
  
The sound of galloping hooves emerged through the clamor and he cursed under his breath, casting his eyes to where the king approached on Bucephalus, grinning with excitement.  The bear monster heard as well.  Circling back, it raised its head in a look to the side; though the movement cost it another deep wound from tireless Leonnatus, it broke back and whirled, gathering itself and leaping over the ring of soldiers.  
  
Alexander drew his sword and urged Bucephalus on even as the soldiers reoriented.  Gasps rose as the monster rose up on its hind legs, looming upward into the sun.  As it extended its claws up to rake them down into the king, Oxyathres’ Noble Phantasm activated.  
  
His view of the world changed in a flash; standing right in front of him, the underside of the beast stretched upward like a hedge wall, rustling and creaking within.  The Persian spun his lance, gripped it tightly, and hurled it like a javelin into the space between beast’s wooden ribs.  
  
The thing screamed, arching farther up and, overbalancing, toppling backwards to the ground.  Behind him, Alexander reined in his horse as the army fell upon the monster, swiftly ensuring its death.  The king let out a gusty, disappointed sigh.  
  
“Ahh, Oxyathres, you should have let me attack it!  It looked like a fun opponent!”  
  
The Persian looked up at him with a grin.  “Iskandar, you know that I would sooner give every drop of my blood to the thirsting sands than to stand by while my sworn liege is endangered.  Do not rebuke me for my own legend!”  
  
The king scoffed, sheathing his sword.  
  
“Monsters in the desert are too rare!” he complained.  “We likely won’t find another for years.”  
  
“This did not look of the desert to me, my friend,” Oxyathres returned, shaking his head as he turned his eyes back to the fallen beast and those beginning to call suggestions to the king about what to do with the carcass.  “Perhaps there will be others like it to come.”  
  
“Well, a man can hope.”

 

* * *

  
"I don't like the looks of these stars, wizard."  Aristander leaned on his staff, staring upward pensively.  "They bode us ill."  
  
"I never studied much astrology," Waver commented, folding his arms.  "What's wrong with them?"  
  
The seer pointed west, to where a reddish star hung near the horizon.  
  
"That star has seen many victories for Alexander the Great," he answered.  "I have never seen it so low in the sky.  Taurus the bull is inverted, and Saturn rides high."  
  
Waver wanted to be skeptical—Clock Tower's teachings had never looked highly on omens and portents, though he'd known mages that disagreed—but given the nature of the desert and the recent strangeness, superstition was getting easier.  
  
"Eggs with no center, hollowed stones, leaking kegs--there's something missing," Aristander went on, voice low and upset.  "I see the signs everywhere, but I don't understand them.  The skill that makes me useful to the king is _failing_ him; _I_ am failing him."  
  
 _The loyalty means more to him than the skill does,_ Waver thought, but he couldn't say it.  He of all people knew what it was to strive to be worthy of Rider's pride.  
  
"…Then maybe it's time we stopped wandering aimlessly," he decided aloud, stepping forward and turning to face his fellow mystic.  The older man looked up at him in confusion.  "Things with no core—If we want to find out what's missing at the center, we have to get there first."  
  
"The heart of the desert?" Aristander asked, gray eyes clouding.  "That is a hard journey."  
  
Waver grinned at him, eyes narrowing.  "Then it'll be all the more satisfying when we get there, won’t it?"  
  
The seer stared at him for several seconds, then bowed his head, laughing ruefully.  
  
"You really do take after him, don't you, wizard?  No, no need to answer; I can see it plainly enough," he finished as Waver flushed and scowled.  "You're right, and I think between the two of us and our king's own instinct we can find him a way there.  Accept it graciously when he insists that we drink before he does, else he'll grow cross," he advised.  
  
"Duly noted," Waver said sourly, and glanced towards the sky again as he and Aristander headed back towards the camp.  The sight of the stars nagged at him in a way he couldn't quite place.  
  
 _What's that mean?_ he wondered, frowning.   _Are even things like our own thoughts omens here?_  
  
Pale blue embers glowing in fathomless depths; long robes consumed in flames—a mortal memory from lifetimes ago, or a dream he was only now remembering?  
  
The sudden sounding of a horn from the camp shocked him from the thought; he and the seer shared an alarmed look, then broke into a run.

 

* * *

  
“Three squadrons gone, my king.”  Eumenes bowed his head, dark hair masking the tense set of his lips.  “There is no sign of where or how.”  
  
Rider stood--he _unfolded,_ angry and deliberate, his presence filling the room as he glared down at the table.    
  
Watching from the corner of the tent, Waver frowned, fingers tightening infinitesimally on the sleeves of his coat.  Rider’s anger was so rare, especially here; he didn’t envy the men who’d had to contend with it in life.  When the king turned his hard-eyed gaze in the direction of his erstwhile-Master, Waver straightened hurriedly, arms dropping to his sides.    
  
“Does Eumenes speak for you, too, Waver?” Rider asked him, voice low.  The mage steeled himself and nodded evenly.  
  
“The spells I tried couldn’t find any trace.  No sign of them, no sign of what took them—not even a prana residue.”  He paused, then finished carefully.  “But I’ve talked with Aristander the seer, and we have an idea.”  
  
He waited, aware of the generals’ murmurs, holding Rider’s stare—he’d do anything Alexander asked of him without a second’s regret, and formality had come with the process of finding his place in the army, but he’d never quite gotten the hang of humility before the king, not after the bridge so long ago.  
  
Slowly, Rider nodded for him to go on.  
  
“The omens say there’s something missing,” Waver began with the permission, moving forward.  “The core’s dropped out of the Reality Marble; something’s wrong in the center.  If we want to stop it, that’s where we have to go.”  
  
Craterus pushed himself upright swiftly.  “Alexander, we have already lost six hundred men!  Can we afford to lose the numbers it will take to reach the heart of the desert?”  
  
“Can we afford to wait and lose more?” Waver countered.  “Anyone we’ve ever lost here finds their way back eventually; it’s better to lose them to something we know than something we don’t.”  It sounded callous, he knew, but if he couldn’t talk about calculated risks in a tent full of the advisors of the greatest conqueror the world had ever known, then they might as well dissolve the Reality Marble and all pass on.  
  
“Patience can reveal weakness that haste overlooks,” Ptolemy opined from over knit fingers.  “Might our enemy not show more of himself given time?”  
  
“But there is the chance that this is just an opening sally,” Perdiccas put in, tapping on the table abstractedly.  “The next time may be worse.”  
  
“But if it did reach us here and will continue to deplete our strength, why do its job for it by trekking into the center?” Craterus threw back.  
  
“Because that’s where the answer is,” said Waver forcefully.  
  
“And because it’s where we’ll be the strongest.”  
  
Silence greeted this pronouncement, and Perdiccas stared levelly back at the questioning looks.  
  
“…In the heart of the desert…?” ventured Coenus.  
  
Perdiccas answered simply.  “That’s where our loyalty meant the most.”  
  
 _…And that’s that argument won,_ Waver thought as they all turned their looks from the man who’d received the king’s dying behest to Alexander himself.  
  
He looked back at them, and Waver felt his heart begin to beat again, the thrill curling through his stomach, as Rider grinned—joyful, dangerous, and challenging, the King of Conquerors’ smile.  
  
“So it did.  And it won’t go unrewarded.”  He slashed one broad arm out, sending scrolls flying.  “Inform the companions!  We make for the heart of the desert!”

 

* * *

 

Weeks later, and to Waver one of the stranger parts of all of this was that he could state that—weeks.  Memory in the desert had always been curious, coming and going as if by its own mysterious whims, but of late events had been more clearly progressing one to the next, as men and women slowly began to fall to the rigors—the longer days, the scarcer waters, the strange beasts that had begun appearing in increasing numbers.  
  
Navigation had been simple enough for a while—let Rider toss some stones, go in the direction Aristander said they indicated, and keep a consistent position relative to the sun—but then, with black clouds racing across the sky from the western horizon behind them, they’d found the canyons.  More than a few men had raised concerns over the path flooding, but Aristander had been insistent bordering on desperate that they press on.  
  
Waver shaded his eyes, peering up the sheer walls.  Red stone sandwiched in layers of glossy obsidian, which seemed unlikely bordering on geologically impossible.  This did not make him feel any better about touching it; despite telling himself he was being a ninny, he couldn’t shake the fear that his fingers might be slipping over cracks in reality.  
  
 _All right.  So what do I think are the odds of getting a familiar up that high?_  
  
“There’ll be no scaling that,” said Peucestas behind him, adjusting his helm as he likewise craned his neck back trying to see the tops of the cliffs, so high overhead that the sky looked less like sky and more like the scratched blue line of a river crawling across a map.  
  
 _And It’s not like I’ve seen any birds in here anyway,_ the magus thought, nodding and scowling.  He commented in vague agreement, turning his attention back to the branching path ahead of him.  One looked as good as the other, to his eye; Aristander hadn’t found any signs he felt confident in and was sitting a few yards behind, resting in the shade with his staff over his knees.  
  
Well, nothing for it.  This was the first _true_ trial he’d ever faced since becoming a part of the Reality Marble, and he’d be damned if Lord El-Melloi II failed to measure up to the example set by the rest of Rider’s followers.  He stretched his arms forward, hands curving around the circumference of a magic circle as wind whistled away from him, carrying the scents of old books, tobacco smoke, and rainwater as it kicked up dust devils along the canyon floor.  
  
There were many aspects of being a Heroic Spirit that still felt strange to him, even after all this time, and one of the very strangest was being able to summon ten liters of mercury out of thin air instead of having to lug it around in reinforced rolling suitcases.  Compared to that, the old annoyance of having to use Kayneth’s chants instead of his own words didn’t rate even an eye-roll.  
  
“Fervor, mei sanguis—Volumen Hydragyrum!”  
  
Peucestas watched curiously as the seal flared alight between Waver’s hands, its crimson lines parting to admit a silver mass; the globe, this time, not the girl.  Peucestas had seen the spell before, of course—it almost hadn’t been fair, how quickly that hunt had ended—but what use the wizard had for it now he couldn’t begin to guess.  He blinked when Waver turned to him.  
  
“This is going to be faster if you let me use the shield,” the man said bluntly, the wind around him dying down.  
  
Peucestas pulled the item closer almost unconsciously, rebuking, “Waver, this shield is sacred.”  
  
“To Athena.  I know.  Don’t you think we could use some wisdom right now?”  At the other’s continued reluctance, he raked back his dark hair, sighing hard.  “I can send her ahead,” he elaborated, jerking a thumb back at the globe of mercury waiting behind him, “but she can only go so far before the connection gets too thin.  If the canyon goes on past that, it’s a waste of time.  I can use her to scry, but for that I need a vessel.”  His long fingers sketched a rough circle in the air.  “It’s just for the focus.  I promise it’s not going to get damaged.”  
  
Peucestas glanced back up the canyon trail.  A pair of scouts lingered some yards off, waiting for any word to bring back.  The black clouds pursuing them were not yet visible, but they’d been making far better time than the weary army, and could not but be upon them soon.  
  
He could remember, still, the night crossing of the Hydaspes, the thunder and the dark, the ferocity of the river such that it seemed a defender all itself, and the constant fear of what might fall upon them unknown.  
  
 _Not an experience I’m anxious to relive,_ he thought; and so, pressing a brief kiss to the shield’s metal lip, loosed it from his arm and passed it to Waver.  
  
 _Though,_ he reflected, watching the wizard direct his familiar into the bowl of the shield with a gesture and a word, _at least this time there won’t be any war elephants._

 

* * *

  
Roxana shivered as another cold gust ripped through Bucephalus’ mane and slid, serpent-swift, beneath her clothing.  Alexander’s arm tightened around her and she leaned into him in response, but still reached out to pat at the mare's neck.  Behind them, men toiled on, even the clanking of armor and the steps of so many barely heard over the roar of thunder overhead, branching forks of lightning splitting the sky into an ever-changing patchwork.  
  
A light flared ahead, a scout’s lamp flashing once, twice—five times in all, and she could feel through her skin her husband’s low, furious breath.  Silently, she wrapped her fingers over his scarred forearm; a moment later his hand pressed against hers, taut and pained.  She said nothing, as there was nothing to be said that could soothe him for the continued loss of his men to the labyrinth his own soul’s landscape had become.  It was almost enough to drive out her ongoing count of the ways she and the others had of making their enemy suffer, once they found him.  
  
Almost.  
  
Riding at the king’s right hand, Hephaestion bowed his head to his passenger.  Roxana could see that even in the heavy rain, the Greek seer stared up into the sky, seeking meaning in the storm.  He spoke into Hephaestion’s ear and the man nodded, looking up to Alexander and signaling rightward.  
  
The king nodded in turn and twitched his charger’s reins.  Down the column, she could hear commands shouted back in relay as Bucephalus turned down another narrow corridor, water choppy about her great hooves.  Ranging ahead of them, she could see Mithrenes pick out Hephaestion’s signal and gesture to the two accompanying him.  Slim Leonnatus, barely more than a shadow in the dark, nodded and vanished ahead into the downpour; Waver straightened wearily, his sodden coat betraying that he still hadn’t cast any spells to keep dry—saving his strength, she supposed.  She sympathized, but doubted she’d have shown the same restraint in his place.  
  
 _A great sorcerer will have a great palace,_ she told herself as they pressed on.   _Even if we have to scale the cliffs to reach it—Alex climbed up my walls; he’ll climb up these too.  And then we’ll hang the sorry wretch out by the entrails and the_ sun _will come back._  
  
She glared up at the black sky, half in longing and half in reproach, and felt her eyes widen as she saw the eagle.  
  
Soaring on a crack of thunder like the hammer of a god splitting a mountaintop, twin bolts fractured into white fire against the dark, etching the afterimage of great wings onto her vision.  Her glance followed in the direction they pointed, where an opalescent light flickered dimly against the clouds.  As tinny sound returned, she barely heard Aristander crying out as if his soul were tearing away.  
  
“The eagle!  Follow it!  Follow it, my king, _follow!_ ”  
  
Hephaestion needed no words nor sign.  Pulling up sharply on the reins of his golden stallion, he drove his heels into its flanks, urging it forward with loud voice.  Alexander did the same, shout resonant in his chest as Bucephalus broke into a charge.  
  
Roxana held onto the edge of the saddle, summoning her bow into her hand.  Icy water spattered against her legs as they rode down the canyon floor, passing Leonnatus and the others in moments, but none of it mattered because now, carried up from behind them by the throats of hundreds, rose the battle-cry.  Around them, the walls stretched higher and higher, the bands of obsidian widening into black maws; they rode now through the void, filled with the roar of men and thunder.  
  
Alexander and Hephaestion moved in unison, following a shared instinct around a turn she barely saw, and it opened ahead of them: a wide cavern, its black walls scintillating with a thousand colors reflected from the center spire, a dark column which burned at the top like a witchfire sun.  No trace remained of the great desert, no golden sand or endless sky, no ocean, no hot burn of unquenchable desire.  Roxana’s hand tightened on the bow and she turned up to her husband, heart in her throat.  
  
“It’s no part of you!  Destroy it!”  
  
Beside them, as Alexander stared transfixed at the swirling, pulsing glow, Hephaestion added his voice to her own.  
  
“Aristander’s raving!  He says you have to open the way!”  
  
The king blinked, looking the black spire up and down, then nodded to himself, the motion rendered ghostly by the pale wash of light on his sun-dark skin.  As the army began to flood into the cavern, he dismounted, unsheathing his sword and raising it high.  A curve of absolute command, it descended and lightning answered, knotting and crackling about the blade as the Gordius Wheel thundered down from the sky.  
  
Knowing the charger would not stand another rider long, Roxana swung down from Bucephalus and moved to Hephaestion’s side, watching Alexander leap into the chariot and seize the reins.  Almost lost in the sweep of his great red cape, another figure made a staggering dive for the vehicle, bony wrists and scholar’s calluses standing out pale against the wrought iron and brass.  As he regained his balance, Waver grinned up at the King of Conquerors, who laughed unstintingly and clapped him on the back.  
  
The army watched them rise and circle, cheering and calling to their ruler.  Joyously, Roxana lifted her bow and joined the cacophony.  She felt Hephaestion’s hand brush her shoulder and turned, but the comfort was not for her—Aristander lay trembling in the blond man’s arms, eyes glassy and unseeing.  Sharp words of reassurance formed on her tongue, but before she could speak, the seer’s hand had lashed out, cupping the back of her neck.  Even as she jerked back in surprise, he pulled himself halfway out of the saddle to bring his words to her ear.  
  
“Seek the gates of fulfillment.”  
  
He drew back, and in the blinding crack of light as Alexander split the tower’s summit, smiled—a perfect, serene smile full of gratitude and regret.  
  
The world—  
  
 _—n             u                l                          l                                  e                                         d_

 

* * *

  
His eyes snapped open.  Raw emptiness echoed in his mind, a mirror of the smear of gray overhead, and desolation rose in his throat, sourceless and all-consuming.  
  
A woman moaned from nearby; he sat up and stared at her, hoping…  But she was petite and dark, with tumbling black hair that spilled across her eyes as she stared at him without recognition.  No one he knew.  Was she?  
  
Across an expanse of dull grass and sloping moor, a flash of red caught his eye.  The man stood, and with him, memory returned—court and war and fever and the desert; Alexander and Aristotle and Roxana and all the rest.  
  
 _I am Hephaestion and that is my king and closest friend._  
  
 _Alexander!_  
  
He stood laboriously, using his longspear to pull himself upright and offering Roxana his hand.  Instantly, she moved towards the king’s side.  He himself hesitated, looking across the plain, assessing their numbers even as Alexander had to be doing.  
  
Ptolemy and Thaïs helping each other worriedly to their feet.  Calanus, eyes closed and chanting under his breath, hands clenched desperately tightly around his sword, looking seconds away from slipping into meditative trance.  
  
Lysimachus, Perdiccas, Peucestas, all gathering their composure…  
  
From nearby, making their respective ways towards the small group, Leonnatus, Eumenes, Philip, Oxyathres…  
  
 _Too few.  Gods above, it’s too few._  
  
Behind him, Bucephalus rolled up to her feet, whinnied unhappily and cantered off in her master’s direction.  Hephaestion caught Alexander’s eye as he turned and pain arched between them unspoken.  Slowly, he began to walk towards the king.  Seeing that his friend was coming, Alexander turned again, surveying the land.  As the broad line of his shoulders straightened, one more survivor became apparent—Waver, staring blankly down at nothing and white to the lips, one hand gripping Alexander’s cape.  
  
 _Still shaken,_ Hephaestion thought, looking around at the others—only fifteen left out of thousands.   _All of us are…_  
  
Silence held court for long moments, the companions meeting one another’s gazes and looking away, exchanging light touches of support and comfort.  No one but Hephaestion dared speak to the king; Roxana slipped away as he approached.  
  
“Alexander…”  He paused, searching for words, but they knew each other too well for there to be such need.  
  
“I’ll recover,” his friend answered, voice flat and empty—drained, to Hephaestion’s ear, and no wonder.  But in front of the others was not the place to say so.  
  
“What now?” he asked instead, letting his hand on the taller man’s shoulder fall back deferentially.  
  
Alexander mulled it over, eyes flicking over the others.  The situation called for caution, Hephaestion knew with certainty, and waited.  The remaining Somatophylakes likewise remained silent.  
  
Of the others, Calanus had calmed and watched Alexander silently, his breath rising and falling evenly, while Eumenes’ eyes scanned the horizon, his hair hanging straight and motionless in the dead, windless air.  Oxyathres had knelt, one hand resting along his lance; he was perhaps praying, though in the absence of water, flame, or even open sunlight.  Philip’s hand rested lightly on Waver’s arm, the physician clearly concerned with the wizard’s continued abstraction.  Briefly, Hephaestion wondered if it was the loss of strength in the men of later days that kept Waver in such shock, but—no, the man’s eyes were no longer empty, but burning and furious with thought, mouth compressed into a tight line.  
  
“He must have meant ‘gates of horn.’  They’re very similar words,” Hephaestion heard Thaïs say from where she and Roxana now stood with heads bowed together, speaking softly.  
  
Waver looked up.  
  
“But why would he be quoting Homer’s wordplay at a time like that?” the courtesan went on, frowning.  “The gates of horn are—“  
  
“The Dreaming.   _That’s_ where we are.”  
  
In countless centuries, Hephaestion had never heard such intensity in the younger man’s voice.  Waver stood at attention, looking up to Alexander with complete certainty as everyone turned to stare at him.  
  
“I remember everything now,” the wizard declared, voice pitched to carry.  “And I know what Aristander’s omens meant.    
  
“Something’s happened to Morpheus.”  
  
END PROLOGUE

 

* * *

 

So this fic is shaping up to be long.  I’m planning to have the chapters cover whole arcs, so while I don’t expect there to be many, I do expect them to be some time in the making—the first chapter is already  twice the size of the prologue and is only about halfway to 2/3rds done.  I will probably fill time with sidestories here and there, though.  
  
All my thanks to [Megkips](../users/Megkips/pseuds/Megkips) for the constant encouragement, the beta reading, and the seed of the idea itself; I would not be here without her cheerleading and assistance.  
  
A brief cast list for those curious can be found [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14m4LJmFS1IhfarWgWlGH6x1UDdHt5zluyw416JOkfnk/edit?usp=sharing); I’ll probably also have a post for details on Servant Class and Noble Phantasms around the time of the first chapter.


	2. Dreaming - Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morpheus and the desert are both missing, and Rider is determined to find the Dream King's castle (whether to get answers or new territory is yet to be determined; he's flexible). But the Dreaming is a big place, and for all that they've lived there for centuries, the Hetairoi still have no idea what they're getting into.

Their supplies were long gone, vanished with the foot soldiers and the camp followers and everyone else.  The temperature on the moor was as nondescript as everything else about it, though, and so the survivors moved to the top of the slope, set Leonnatus and Peucestas to guard (and Bucephalus to discontented grazing), and arranged themselves in a loose half-circle for the impromptu strategy meeting.  No one questioned it when Waver moved to the center rather than sitting down.

Glancing around at the expressions of his fellows—worried, frustrated, grim, and Rider above all simply expectant—he took a breath he hoped not too many of them would notice and began speaking slowly, organizing his thoughts as he went.

“All right.  First off, I need everyone to remember that the stories mortals have about the gods don’t usually reflect the whole truth.  So no one ask me about Hypnos or Nyx or anything like that.  Morpheus isn’t quite a god, anyway, more like—a part of the way the world works.  You could say he’s a function of the universe.  There are seven of them in all, but—“

“Which seven?” Ptolemy broke in.  He looked fascinated in spite of himself; beside him, skepticism and intrigue warred across Thaïs’s features. 

"—I only know the ones I ever crossed paths with, I was going to say,” Waver finished, thinking ruefully that being a teacher had spoiled him for having audiences that didn’t interrupt every thirty seconds.  “Dream, Death, and Destiny.” 

“You have met Death?” Lysimachus asked interestedly, leaning in.  “Thanatos?  I’ve never heard of Thanatos actually appearing to anyone.”

"Nor have I,” Thaïs chimed in, a dangerous glint in her eyes, and it belatedly occurred to Waver, _Next time don’t start the lecture by telling the woman who burned down half of Persepolis over a temple desecration to ignore everything she knows about her religion._ “Do tell us more, Lord El-Melloi II.”

He strove not to backpedal.  “She just called herself Death.  She was waiting for me as soon as I realized I hadn’t survived that prana drain.”  Seeing the attentive expressions around him, he sighed and elaborated.  “She was—“

“A white-skinned woman with black hair and a curious smile?” Rider rumbled, face inscrutable.  When Waver blinked at him in surprise, he simply nodded fractionally, declining to speak further.  The companions glanced around at each other for a moment before finally one of them spoke again.

“But what has this to do with our army?”  Perdiccas, long legs propped awkwardly against the rising angle of the ground, frowned with displeasure. 

Waver, still looking at Rider in concern, reverted to his earlier line of discussion and went on.  “You all know about the Throne of Heroes, right?”  A round of nods answered him.  “All right.  I don’t know all the details here, but from what I understand it’s like this: the Throne of Heroes can hold all of the _people_ it needs to, but the Ionioi Hetairoi is different.  It’s got something to do with the fact that we’re all together there.  It’s not just a memory; it’s a shared state—and an idealized one at that.  The Throne could hold all of us individually and to a certain extent it does, but for all of us to be together like we are needs something less”—he looked for alternatives to the word “programmed” and settled for—“rigid.  So we as we are exist in the Dreaming—Morpheus’ realm.”

As the questions came at him in a flood, Waver focused on Rider, who had closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. 

_When they had passed the waters of Oceanus and the rock Leucas, they came to the gates of the sun and the land of dreams, whereon they reached the meadow of asphodel where dwell the souls and shadows of them that can labor no more._

Waver had read The Odyssey to students, to the tenth Archibald heir and her children, and more than anything to himself, and he could imagine very clearly what Rider was thinking.  _You are dead,_ he thought at his king, heart aching, _you just don’t realize it very often.  I’m sorry I had to remind you._  

"I have a question.  Why is it that you know this and we don't?"  Hephaestion's voice cut through the flurry, catching Waver in an intent, searching stare.  The others fell silent and Waver cursed the heat rising into his cheeks.  But dammit, it wasn't like he'd been intentionally keeping it a secret for this long.  
  
"Death told me a bit," he said uncomfortably, "and Dream a bit more.  But after that first night it slipped my mind."  He looked at Rider, ignoring Oxyathres's muttered _Well, we drank enough_ , and Phillip's faint snort of agreement.  "It seemed like he was worried about what you'd do if you knew."  
  
 _Honestly he talked like it was a headache he wanted to avoid,_ added a considerably more truthful internal voice, but by that point Roxana had begun grinning slyly and nudging Rider's broad hip.  
  
A smirk teased up one side of Rider's mouth, showing teeth, and he nodded.  
  
"This Morpheus knows the king well," he said, tone rueful with a twist of ominous pleasure.  "So, what's befallen him, my magus?"  
  
Waver really hated it when Rider acknowledged him in the same breath as saying something guaranteed to give him a huge headache.  He shook his head.  
  
"There's no telling from here, and it's not like I've got an encyclopedic knowledge of how he works anyway.  But if I had to take a guess I'd say he's missing or dead, if you can kill an anthropomorphic personification of dreams.  Aristander said the center was missing--I can't think of a likelier explanation."  
  
Rider rubbed his chin speculatively; his magus, feeling the headache setting in, knew that there wasn't a single person in circle who didn't see the next words coming—a grinning Hephaestion was bloody _mouthing_ them!  
  
"Leaving an unattended throne, then."  
  
Waver sighed hard.  
  
"Well," he allowed, "we won't know until we check."

 

* * *

 

The expanse of the moor lasted for almost a week, by Calanus’s reckoning.  Everyone else lost the sense of time after about the third day of sunless, unchanging pall.  The sage kept mostly to himself through the small bickering over direction and intent that followed, himself content to walk until weariness—they didn’t need supplies or even much rest, but it had always taken the others longer to adjust to such things.

On the seventh day, though, a mist began to thicken, first only ankle-high but rising like an oncoming tide until they walked through a gray sea.  It clung to the skin and hung wetly in the throat, reminding him too much of the racking cough and weight in the lungs that had brought his travels to an end in Persia so very long ago. 

Not so long, though, that he wasn’t relieved to see the great hulking shape slowly emerging from the fog.  Details resolved as they grew closer: a wooden home of ornate craft, old and dark, pointed at the top; windows broken and sieving in fog through the glass; decaying steps up to a door hanging loose in the frame.

“Just like out of a storybook,” Waver muttered cynically somewhere on the far side of Bucephalus’s bulk.  “Well, don’t ask me,” he went on in annoyance as heads turned his way.  “About the only thing I ever dreamed about was _him,_ anyway.”

Alexander chuckled, deep and approving.  “We shall explore it,” he pronounced.  “Any change will be favorable at this point.”  He glanced around at his depleted followers, then commanded, “Hephaestion, Lysimachus, Calanus, Waver—and Eumenes.  Go and rout the place out and see what there is to report.”

A chorus of assents answered him and the five men made their way up the stairs.  Lysimachus took the lead, easing the door back with his sword arm and slipping in, shield raised.  At his signal the others came on and spread out across the room.

A small area, for five grown men, and that was to say nothing of all the cobwebs.  They hung limp, sad and empty in the half-light, spun across chairs, cabinets, and low tables draped with faded lace.  Spaces in the walls opened to other areas of the house; the bottom of a stairway was visible through the one at the back.  Without speaking, Hephaestion gestured Calanus and Lysimachus though the rightward doorway.  Eumenes joined them silently, while Hephaestion and Waver moved for the other opening. 

Through the doorway was a bedroom, similarly gray with accumulated time.  A large wardrobe dominated most of what space was not taken up by the ancient, wooden-framed bed.  Eumenes methodically searched through the heavy, drab coats and shoes in the cabinet while Lysimachus moved along the wall to the small door at the back of the chamber.  He paused before opening it, glancing at the others.  Calanus crouched, swiftly passing first his gaze then his arm beneath the bed, finding only a chill emptiness and more dust.  He straightened up and nodded.

Peering around the door as Lysimachus opened it revealed a tiny room with a tiled floor and raised tub.  The white-haired soldier shrugged and stood aside for Eumenes, whose cool gray eyes moved calmly about the room noting details.  Calanus lingered in the bedroom, running his hand across the fading design on the papered walls—small handfuls of flowers knotted with ribbon, the soft blue of it the only color left in the fuzzy gray edges and amorphous brown of the rest of the room.  Outside the sole window, he could see Perdiccas and Roxana shadowing Leonnatus in a circuit around the house’s exterior. 

The king’s secretary emerged from the inner room looking faintly pensive and the three of them returned to the front room.  At Hephaestion’s questioning look, Lysimachus shrugged and shook his head. 

“Keep alert,” the blond said softly, breaking the silence for the first time.  “We’ll take the hall; the three of you check upstairs.”

They nodded, and the group moved into the hallway, a long stretch of emptiness with a side room and a door to the outside at the far end.  Calanus followed his companions to the upper floor, listening to the creak and groan of the stairs as they climbed.  Portraits lined the wall, men in clothes similar to what Waver wore, women and children sitting beside them in dull foreign attire.  Water stains and discoloration mottled the surfaces of the images, gray bleeding into old ivory yellow running into leathery brown, and in every one of them  the faces were obscured completely save for the odd staring eye or tight-set corner of lips.

 _Like a storybook._ He reflected on Waver’s words.  _But whose story?  Whose nightmare?  Ones who visited or one who lived here?_

The upstairs room was small, the rafters coming to a steep point overhead.  The shadows hung thicker as well, little dispersed by the pale, hesitant light passing through a circular window little wider than a man’s head on the far wall.  Muted colors stood out here and there in the gloom—a long blue and yellow box on one side of the room, a matching rug in the center, a child’s bed in the corner covered in blue with red stars.  Red letters inscribed a short word on the box—Waver’s letters, Calanus thought, though Eumenes would know with more certainty, and the secretary indeed moved towards it as they made their way in behind Lysimachus.  The soldier turned a circle at the center of the room, looking bemusedly at the ceiling.  He shot Calanus a glance, received a noncommittal look in return, and sighed.

“With luck they’re having a more interesting time downstairs.  Or outside,” he said, moving to the window and peering out of it. 

Calanus made no comment, crossing over to the bed and dropping to one knee, lifting up the edge of the blanket.  Movement across the room caught his attention: Eumenes running a purposeful fingertip across the edge of the box and rubbing it against the pad of his thumb.  Frowning, the secretary turned to his companions, mouth opening to speak.

He froze, eyes widening sharply, in the same moment that Calanus felt the whisper of moving air across his skin.

The world jerked sideways as the thing pulled him off-balance, his sword cracking loudly on the floor as he threw out his arm for purchase.  The grip on his wrist and ankle tightened, glossy black claws digging into his skin with pinprick sharpness.  The arms, fleshy but studded with clusters of small scales, receded into invisibility beneath the bed, but at the center of the void one bloodshot eye, huge and round, stared back at him with an atavistic hunger that stopped his breath.

The clarity of training stepped in, slowed time, asserted itself before everything else.  He perceived:

Lysimachus behind him, voice raised with outrage and alarm.

The rustle of cloth as Eumenes shot to his feet.

The rough edges of the floor beneath him, jagged but weak, splintering rather than offering any handholds against the strength of the creature beneath the bed.

And, still arresting, the raw desperation embodied in the single staring eye.

 _I see,_ Calanus thought.  _But that is one thing; my life is another._

He planted his free foot on the frame of the bed and pushed back, propelling the Hand of Kāla, his black blade, into a heavy swing even as Lysimachus’s bright sword slashed towards the monster’s other limb. 

The scream of something young and animal rattled the window, but if the thing was a child, its skin was still tough and unyielding as a veteran crocodile’s.  Lysimachus tore his weapon free of the monster’s hide and raised it to try again, but Calanus had no such leverage, heaving futilely at his stuck blade.

Three more hands joined the first two, one whipping out to seize Lysimachus’s elbow, lengthening and cracking, breaking new joints in itself as it angled upward, pulling the soldier off his feet.  The others seized Calanus’s calf and began jerking downward.  Above him, his student cursed and kicked defiantly, yelling.

“Hephaestion, dammit, we need _help_ up here!”

Calanus gritted his teeth, struggling and twisting to keep the weight on his leg as another monstrous hand clawed its way from beneath the bed, and another, both closing over his shoulders.  With a final jolt, the creature pulled his foot free as Lysimachus cried out in denial.  He slid forward two feet in an instant, legs vanishing beneath the bedframe, before Eumenes caught his wildly flailing arm and tried to pull back, only to himself be dragged forward one staggering step at a time.

Footsteps came pounding up the stairs; out of the corner of his eye the Indian could see the swirl of white and red as his other two companions finally arrived. 

“An armhold!” Eumenes snapped breathlessly, and Hephaestion ran forward as Waver began to chant.

 _His Noble Phantasm,_ Calanus thought as his hips sank past the bottom of the bed.  _May it be more effective than the swords._ A numbness had begun to crawl over the bottoms of his feet and up his legs, and the grasping things down there in the dark were less human, brushing feathers and smooth lengths of ropy flesh, but all with the same inexorable strength.  He would not stop fighting nor let his mind be clouded, however; that was the result of all his years with his order of Naga sadhus, one of his own abilities as a Heroic Spirit.

“—perils of waves and war.  Let this be added to the tale of those,” he heard from near his ear in Waver’s grim, resolute voice, and the wizard planted his hand down on the dark flesh of the creature.  “Tidal Flux.” 

The current of power washing out of El-Melloi and into the monster passed over Calanus completely, but there was no mistaking the spasms and wailing of a spirit that had just had its prana flow so completely disrupted.  Calanus threw one freed hand back out of the dark, catching at the edge of the bed with his forearm.  Instantly he felt it seized by the others, and inch by slow inch, they hauled him back out of the maw.

“Flip the bed,” Waver commanded, voice clipped.  Hephaestion nodded and pulled his spear out of the floor.  With a clean whirl, he drove it beneath the bed and, crouching to set the shaft beneath his shoulder, pushed it up, bearing the bedframe on it.

All five of them stared and backed away as the gray half-light burned away the miasma, revealing the squirming tangle.  It hid the eye at the thickness of its center, wailing and thrashing before its limbs finally quivered and stilled.  Already, it cast a fainter shadow in the room.  The men looked at one another for several silent seconds until Calanus patted Lysimachus’s shoulder to be let down.  His student acquiesced reluctantly and the sage trotted over to his sword.

“Well, you look all right,” Hephaestion sighed.  “Check with Philip anyway.  We’ll finish up here.”

 

* * *

 

“It looks like a haunted house.  Or a creepy one, anyway.  The kind of thing you’d visit as a kid and get scared of.”

Rider nodded intently at Waver’s words, looking around the assembled group.  Hephaestion spoke up next.

“No supplies, no equipment worth taking,” he said, shrugging.  “The thing under the bed was it, and it disappeared not long after we flipped the bed over.”

“It was starving,” Calanus volunteered, sitting cross-legged and attentive.  “I could see if very clearly.”

“But how does a dream creature starve?” Lysimachus pondered, leaning on the edge of his shield.

“Not enough kids to snack on?” Waver suggested acidly.  “Or it’s the same as the desert and it can’t survive whatever happened to Dream indefinitely.”

Eumenes cleared his throat.  The others looked his way, and Rider nodded for him to go on.

“That would be consistent with the rest of the house,” the secretary said quietly.  “It isn’t simply that it’s empty.  What was more noticeable was how little it seemed a place that had ever been lived in at all.  Even what _was_ there was degrading.  Everywhere that there was a picture, the faces were blurred.  Everywhere that there was writing, it was indistinct.  The rooms had only large furniture, no smaller details or decoration.  There were places in the corners where the walls were coming undone completely.  I believe it is as Lord El-Melloi II says—it is a memory of a place, not a place in itself.  It may well have only been the creature upstairs holding the place together at all.  With it defeated, I think the rest will fall to ruin all the more quickly.” 

Alexander absorbed the report then sighed, planting his hand down on one folded knee.  “Make camp,” he ordered levelly.  “We’ll spend at least a few hours resting by something we can see before we have to trek back into that murk.”

The others obeyed: camp was struck, and sleep had in rotation.  No one was surprised to find the house gone when they woke. 

 

* * *

 

They marched on, the moor and even the ground itself lost to the fog, leaving everyone on edge.  The monster under the bed had been a close call; the voices in the forest were worse.  Sourceless and faint in barely-visible tree boughs, they called and hummed and nibbled away at memory.  They almost lost Ptolemy and Waver both before Alexander called for waxen earplugs and a marching train.  He rode at their head, burning with a purity of purpose that had outlasted death itself, which would be the same without body, without memory, without even a name. 

 _The spirit of Alexander,_ Waver thought muzzily as they all followed in their king’s wake. 

On and on, until even Calanus shook his head when asked how long they’d been travelling, through places where size and geometry seemed to lose all meaning, and all they could do was follow one another’s colors, through the memories of caves and swamps where glowing eyes and teeth gleamed at the edges of their vision, through rooms they each described differently, as familiar as their bedchambers and as terrifying as the waking gasp of uncertainty.

Until, finally, they reached the mountains.

 

* * *

 

“It’s thin.  And it’ll only get thinner farther up,” Roxana advised, squinting through the mist at the path winding up into the distance.  “Steeper, too.”

Leonnatus nodded.  “But it is the only path we’ve found in three days’ march,” he replied quietly.  Alexander will take it.”

“I’m sure he will.  I just wonder if the _horse_ will.”

“Bucephalus will do anything out of sheer spite.  I wouldn’t worry.”

“…Good point.”

When the pass was reported, the company, as predicted by Leonnatus, headed up into the higher terrain, spirits lifting as they went.  Gradually the fog began to thin out until they broke through into clear, cold air.

Hephaestion turned back to look as the others emerged from the fog bank in ones and twos.  He whistled lowly, causing Alexander to look away from his contemplation of the peaks.  The two of them stared for a while at the view, the mountain walls climbing the sky behind them looking like nothing so much as a long breakwater line against the tide. 

“It’s a bit of an Ôkeanos itself, isn’t it?” he asked his friend, who huffed derisively. 

“A thin excuse for it, maybe,” Alexander responded.  “But I’m tired of wading through fog.  Look ahead, Hephaestion!”

Arm over his friend’s shoulders, he turned them to face the cliffs.  The other companions were picking their way up the path, a laughing Roxana in the lead, raking her windblown hair out of her face as she surveyed mountains again for the first time in millennia.  All the same…

“I’d like a future with more pitons in it,” he quipped.

“Hah!”  Alexander laughed, and Hephaestion grinned, feeling his heart lighten even as he saw the smiles on the faces of the others.  “No luck there.  But we won’t need them.”

“Oh, will we not?”

“No thunderstorms, no defenders—I’d be very disappointed if we did!”

“Look!”

The two of them turned at the call from Lysimachus and looked up to the swift, dark shape of a raven against the bright sky.  It angled on a high breeze, circling overhead as the companions grouped together. 

“Another omen?” Oxyathres asked, shading his eyes as he peered up.

“Ravens have meant well for us before,” Ptolemy recalled, and quirked a grin at Thaïs’s murmured, _We’ve certainly fed them well enough._

“But we’re not in our home dream anymore,” Perdiccas countered, frowning upward.  “Who knows what it could mean out here?” 

“It’s coming down, whatever it means,” Peucestas pointed out, and the bird certainly was, whisking down in slow, easy circles.

“It’s a bold one.”  Lysimachus’s tone was admiring as the raven landed on a nearby outcropping, fidgeting and twitching its wings closed.

“Handsome,” Thaïs echoed, putting her head on one side.  Pulling a ring from one finger, she held it towards the visitor, tilting it back and forth in the light.  “And either too well-trained or too intelligent in itself to snatch at anything with a shine,” she concluded when the raven only croaked and preened one shoulder in response.

“It wouldn’t be strange to see one as a familiar,” Waver said with a critical stare.  “And they’re not exactly foreign to the human imagination.  But I agree that we can’t assume anything just from that.”

“Let us not assume, then,” decided Rider.  He stepped forward and held out one arm.  The bird gave it a long look, blinking its bright eyes, then flipped its wings out and fluttered noisily into the air to land on the proffered perch.  Cheerfully ignoring the sharp, intent stares from his followers, Alexander laughed and brought his arm up to look his passenger in the eye.

“Do you have a master, or are you your own?” he asked it, all sincere curiosity.  “I am Alexander, the King of Conquerors, and these are my friends and allies!”  With the characteristically boastful introduction, he turned in place and swept out his free arm to indicate the remaining members of the Hetairoi, voice raised with pride.  The volume made the raven croak in displeasure and hop up to his shoulder.  From there, it surveyed the group one at a time as Rider went on.

“You can see we’re a handsome company.  Just now we’re looking for the house of the king of dreams.”  Roxana cleared her throat and he added dutifully, “Or the gates of horn.”

Finished with its examination of the company, the visitor sidled closer to Alexander’s neck, talons kneading at his broad shoulders.  With a quick twist of its head, its beak closed on the king’s ear; it was airborne before Rider’s retaliatory cuff landed. 

Grunting, the king rubbed at his ear and scowled at the raven, which had landed on a rock well out of reach.  It seemed to come to a decision—it cawed down at them, fluttered to another perch a few yards further along the path, and repeated the call.

The companions looked at one another.

“It’s too smart not to be taking us _somewhere_ ,” Lysimachus opined, smile stealing across his features.

“I’m curious,” said Thaïs, which Roxana followed with, “ _I’d_ like to explore some, now that we’re out.”

Rider grinned in spite of the more dubious looks from most of the others.  “Very well.  Then let us see where the cheeky thing would take us.”

They formed back into a loose column.  As usual, Leonnatus moved ahead, watching the bird’s path with sharp eyes.  The others fitted themselves in, Rider atop Bucephalus in the center, while Peucestas and Waver dropped to the back to keep a cautious vigil over the procession.  Before long, Roxana was clambering among the rocks like one born to them, sighting ahead and gaily calling back turns and low cliffs.  Her husband kept a gaze on her that was too pointed to be only affection; the grin on his face spoke volumes as he watched her move about, her hair and bright garments tossed about by the wind. 

Ptolemy and Thaïs strolled behind the king, trading all the folklore about ravens their extensive educations had afforded them, sometimes pausing to listen to Oxyathres narrate a similar anecdote from the Zoroastrian traditions.  Eumenes, walking ahead of Waver, slowed to knot his long hair, expression mildly annoyed after the fourth time the breeze had teased it from a carefully gathered banner over one shoulder to a snapping, contrary mess of strands.  Sparing a rueful thought for elastic hairbands of a bygone age, Waver followed suit.

As Roxana had predicted, the path grew harder, winding along steep drops and across stone bridges carved with ancient, unsettling symbols none of them could identify.  Still, even as the road narrowed, forcing the companions into single file, their nature held true.

 _If I’d been able to jump like this when I was alive, maybe I wouldn’t have almost given myself a heart attack every time I had to get up to Ryuudouji Temple,_ Waver thought as the group leapt one at a time up to a higher path after their last one dead-ended at a sheer drop.  Still below, Alexander dismounted and stroked Bucephalus’s neck before jumping up to the others of the Hetairoi.

As the charger pawed at the ground, tail snapping, they all backed away to clear space—all save Alexander, who only laughed loudly, calling, “Come up to me, partner!” and whistling piercingly. 

Bucephalus’s ears flattened back in what Waver recognized as vicious annoyance.  The mare dipped forward onto her forelegs then pushed herself back into a carefully balanced stand as she looked upward.  The massive curves of the musculature in her back legs extended suddenly, and Alexander’s unmatchable horse drove herself upward on a kick that raised dirt and pebbles on the ground she’d left and cracked the surface where she landed.

Rider slung an arm around his mount’s broad neck, laughing and praising her.  Roxana shot Leonnatus a glance, suppressing laughter and he, for once, deigned to smile.

 

* * *

 

They found the cave near nightfall, the sun as it sank behind the mountains casting shadows of the peaks out like advancing armies across the fog far below.  The tireless raven cawed a final time and plunged past the opening.  Still in his place near the front of the column, Perdiccas halted, looking back at his approaching king.

“We don’t have torches,” he said as the group peered towards the dim entryway, still a good thirty yards away and atop another cliff wall to boot, conspicuously overlooking the path as it continued on through the mountains.  Alexander hummed thoughtfully, shading his eyes to gauge the angle of the sun.

“I can make us light if we need it.”  Perdiccas looked back at the words from Lord El-Melloi II.  The wizard frowned up at the cave, finishing sarcastically, “But this ‘finding shelter just as the night’s coming on’ thing is pretty thin.  I don’t trust narratively-timed sunsets.”

“He has a point,” Hephaestion agreed ruefully.  “Scouting party?”

“Monsters for _children_ live under beds,” El-Melloi cut back in forcefully as the king opened his mouth.  “God knows what we’re going to find in _there_.  I don’t we should be splitting up anymore.”

 _Why the king has not rebuked you yet for your insolence is beyond me,_ Perdiccas thought, frowning at the other man—but it was an old, well-worn thought, familiar enough in shape that the thinking of it was as fulfilling as the saying would be.  He let it bide, watching Alexander for orders.

“Yet in an enclosed space, we lancers will be more constrained,” Oxyathres pointed out.  “Separated or no, some will have to go ahead.”

“And the longer we talk about it, the farther ahead our raven could be getting.”  This from Lysimachus, with an understanding of animals that came of having a legend shaped by them—a concern which Alexander only chuckled at.

“It means to show us something,” he said with certainty.  “It won’t go without us.  But let us decide on our disposition at the summit, not here beneath it.  Our best defenders shall guard our climb.”

At his gesture, Leonnatus and Peucestas bowed and went ahead, the former reaching the mouth of rock in but a dash and three leaps, while the latter slid his arms through his shield’s straps and followed nimbly after. 

The king had barely turned his attention back to his other companions when a hoarse raven cry and Peucestas calling, “My king!  We are greeted!” drew every eye back to the summit and the shape of a woman half-emerged from the gloom of the cave, broad-shouldered and with a tumbling flood of black curls.  Alexander gestured at El-Melloi without looking away as he shouted up in answer.

“Oh, excellent!  Convey my relief at finding one who can speak and I’ll be with you shortly!”

The wizard’s circle flared, the silver familiar within rippling and changing form as El-Melloi commanded, “Equus!”  Mercury flowed and curved, shaping itself into the likeness of a horse—the likeness of a _specific_ horse, Perdiccas noticed, because you didn’t spend weeks watching a young Alexander train a filly that had been the talk of the horse market and not recognize Bucephalus’s build.

“Waver, bring the rest up after,” Alexander ordered, voice dropping to a murmur.  El-Melloi nodded as the king changed mounts and rode the false horse up through the air and over the ridge.  After a few moments of intent staring, he withdrew his familiar.  The quick gesture of circling one hand palm down at his side flattened it out into a broad silver disc as it settled a few inches above the uneven ground.  The remaining members of the Hetairoi trooped over.

“All right, then—everybody on that can’t clear the wall in three jumps or less.”  El-Melloi, with a forthrightness about the relative frailty of his body that Perdiccas could only assume was common to the men of his later time, walked straight to the middle of the disc and crossed his arms.  Overhead, Alexander’s voice boomed forth in greeting, the echoes obscuring any response.  
  
Roxana had already sprung halfway up the cliff and was pulling herself up the rest of the way in silent, graceful lengths.  Calanus followed suit and Perdiccas moved to the wall, beginning a swift climb.  The others gathered on the mercury’s surface, Hephaestion taking his place at the front of the group after coaxing Bucephalus on as well.  When everyone had settled, El-Melloi crooked a finger up and the disc began rising slowly towards the summit.

 

* * *

 

There was, Alexander thought, something of his mother in the woman Eve—the arc of her eyebrows, perhaps, or something in the quirk of thin, expressive lips.  He found it vaguely off-putting but thought himself owed at least that liberty, as politely as he was overlooking the way her age galloped wildly between that of a maiden no older than Roxana, skin soft and fair, to a doyenne of over seventy, heavy and beleaguered with long years.  Thaïs had told him once, however, that to comment on a woman’s age was unrefined, and he _did_ pride himself on his etiquette. 

“Arthur tells me you’re looking for Dream?” the woman asked.  A touch of pity colored her voice as she spoke, and her eyes were grave.

“…So, something has happened to him,” Alexander concluded.

“Yes,” she nodded, “but there’s no one here who could tell you what.  He went missing, some…”  She trailed off, gaze averting as she thought.  “Twenty years ago, the last I heard.”

He heard a murmur from his followers and asked politely, “Is he very missed?”

Eve reached up to stroke the raven on her shoulder, which chuffed and opened its wings, gliding back into the cave.  She watched it go, then shook her head and turned back, answering ruefully.  “By some more than others.”  She paused, then, giving him a penetrating stare.  He realized he was halfway through stroking his beard and the thought, _There may be dissident factions, then._ She went on as he dropped his hand.

“The _realm_ misses him.  It’s limping on, but it decays without him here to support it.”

Alexander frowned.  “You must have sent some to look for him?”

“They come back with nothing or they don’t come back.  But most dreams don’t have the power to leave in the first place.”

The king hesitated before he spoke, looking over the woman standing before him, now in her thirties, but moments ago a long-legged girl.  No matter her age, to him her dark eyes seemed ancient—but therefore level and composed.  He asked, bluntly.

“Would you know?  If he were dead?”

“Of course we would,” she replied on a softly exasperated breath.  “Aside from what it would do to the Dreaming, his family would have come—Death and Destiny and the rest of them.”

 _And then what?_ he wondered, tilting his head in consideration and crossing his arms.

“As I understand it, if he were dead, there would be a new Dream.  It’s happened before, to one of his siblings.”  She sighed again—an old woman, weary.  “I’m told it’s their opinion that twenty years isn’t enough time to seriously worry about, and they may be proven right yet.”  She shrugged, somewhere between philosophical and resigned.

Anger sparked in Alexander’s chest again, indignant and restless.  _And what of my army?_ he thought, perturbed. _What is their opinion on my men and women who vanished?_

“The place we lived is gone.”  Impatience hardened his voice, rumbling in his throat.  “Many of my followers disappeared with it.  What can you tell me of that?”

“Nothing factual,” she replied, uncowed.  “I would tell you to go to his castle.  They’ll be more up to date there—and there’s always the chance the librarian will have something archived on whatever terms were agreed to when you first came here.”

“ _I_ agreed to—“  He paused and glanced back at Waver, whose expression of fixed attention took on a more cautious cast when Alexander caught his eye.  He pursed his lips, then shook his head faintly.  A few drops of mercury detached themselves and zipped up to float over Waver’s shoulder, forming into the shaped of a high-backed chair.

 _The Throne of Heroes._ The king turned back to Eve, scowling. 

“What will happen if Dream never comes back?” he demanded, though in truth his decision was already made.  (He would, later, tell Eumenes to remind him to reward Aristander when they recovered their seer.)

“Everything that dreams will go on dreaming,” she answered, the clear chimes of an initiate’s voice passing through the wrinkled lips of a high matriarch.  “What does a dream give you, that can be tangibly counted?”

Waves crashing on an eternally distant shore, the salt of the sea coursing through the chambers of his heart every day of his life—he could still hear it, even here.  He glared down at Eve, who gazed back calmly.  

“You know the answer’s ‘everything.’” 

She smiled, inclined her head in acquiescence, and gestured to the cave behind her. 

“Would you like to stay and rest?  We’re very close to Nightmare here—when the sun goes down it’s going to get very strange.”

With the ease of long practice, he hushed the part of him that itched—now and always—to press on.  There was, he expected, a great deal here yet to learn, and others who could ask questions he might not think of on his own.  He grinned purposefully and bowed.

“With all the royal gratitude.”

 

* * *

 

 _Such an ill-humored place, this,_ Leonnatus thought as he watched the lower reaches, hands laced together over the pommel of his sword.  The fog below, such a constant up to now, slunk nearer and nearer to the ground as the moon rose, a purple-tinted silver globe gliding amid unfamiliar stars.  In the lavender cast of its pale illumination, tall figures roved along the slopes.  Spindly, long-limbed things, like young fire-blackened willow trees, they scuttled over the cliffs with an eerie, gravity-defying fluidity, sometimes upright, sometimes laid out like centipedes at their full length.  White cloth hung in tatters over their center trunks, pierced through and pinned out by the charred bones of their appendages.

Somewhere in the scratched lines of them Leonnatus thought there had to be faces, for at times when they would turn and crane towards the cave, orange flames winked and blinked to life: five ember-like lights each time, gathered near the top in what he supposed to be a ghoulish smattering of eyes.  Each time he looked directly into the array, a loud wooden clattering sounded directly behind him.  It had been an ugly, terrifying shock the first few times, whirling with horror and the certainty that somehow one of the things had gotten around behind him, but each time there’d been only the cave, warmly lit from within, the only sound that of muffled talk and sporadic laughter. 

Now he just avoided eye contact.  None of them had yet tried to scale the last wall up to the cave, in any case.  Whatever sort of being Eve was, it seemed the creatures gave her a wide berth.

Footsteps behind him raised his head, but as they were of the normal human variety, the soldier kept his vigil until Philip had joined him at the precipice, close enough that Leonnatus could see him with only a glance to the side. 

“I am officially making the rounds, so no evasion,” Alexander’s physician opened with wry frankness.  “Are you well?”

Leonnatus considered this quietly, short hair moving faintly in the breeze.  He’d yet to be exposed to any physical danger, insomuch as there was physical danger to be found here.  Neither had he lived so long away from Alexander that the voices in the woods had been too harrowing.  Still, if complete honesty was the request… 

“Unsettled,” he allowed.  “But in no danger yet of being unmanned by it.  If it matters to you, my council would be to save your strength.  His Majesty will be wanting to press on far sooner than the sun will rise, if the night here is as long as the day.  And then we’ll have those to fight past, or something like them.”

He nodded at the creatures below and watched sideways as Philip followed the gesture down into the low mists.  As if feeling the attention, one of the tatterdemalions thrust itself up from a crawl, the amber lights of its gaze fluttering to life.  Philip’s breath caught raggedly in his throat and he spun around, the blue chlamys he preferred to armor flying.  Leonnatus gave it three seconds before he turned as well, putting a light hand on the older man’s shoulder.

“There’s nothing there.  It doesn’t even make a sound outside your own head.”  He paused, meeting the other’s gaze levelly as he turned back, rattled.  “But it is…”

“Unsettling,” Philip finished.  “Yes.”

Leonnatus turned back to his guard.  “How are things inside?” he asked quietly. 

“…Well, the bird talks,” Philip answered dryly after a beat to gather himself.  “It’s quite full of itself, actually.”

“Who provoked it?”  The soldier permitted himself a faint smirk.

“Who else?”  As always, Philip hid laughter very poorly.  “Lysimachus kept prodding at it.  The last I saw, it was trading barbed quotations with Ptolemy.”

 _We may never escape, then,_ Leonnatus thought, but aloud asked simply, “And the others?”

“Trying to chart our course ahead,” his companion replied.  “The lady Eve says that the way to the center is a spiral, but without maps or reliable landmarks, only knowing that is less than helpful.  It seems we will know our path is correct when we find the houses of two brothers.”

Leonnatus nodded fractionally.

“And Alexander.”  This question he could speak only as a whisper, a breath on the night air and no more, too reluctant to summon any memory of the king’s weakness or failing.

_The desert has been too kind to us._

At his side, Philip sighed softly.  “Angry,” he murmured, “and grieving.  Yet so long as we’ve still Hephaestion, I think it will bide.  He has ever been the surest balm for the king’s tempers.”

The shorter man dipped his head in another shallow nod, replying with a clipped, “Gods willing, we will keep him this time.”

“Our powers are stronger here than they were,” Philip affirmed.  “No mortal sickness will take him, that I can promise.”

Leonnatus made a noncommittal noise, eyes not straying from the nightmares below.  Perhaps Philip guessed at his thoughts, for he too fell silent, observing the movement of the decidedly-not-mortal creatures wandering the cliffs. 

“Still,” he said after some time.  “Perhaps the outside world will be safer.”

Leonnatus glanced up at him without surprise.

“You also think we will be leaving, then.”

“I think that our king will not be whole again until he has restored the others—and if there is only one thing I could say of Alexander, it is that such wounds only drive him harder.”

“Will we be able to exist there as we are now?”  That was the only real concern Leonnatus had, though he would follow Alexander regardless of the answer.

“That’s a better question for our wizard than for me, I would say,” the doctor answered, wry again.   “But the lady Eve did not contradict Alexander about sending Dream’s vassals to search for him, so I think we will be able to.  For a time, at least.”

Leonnatus hummed in agreement and the two fell quiet again, keeping an easy, wordless company until Peucestas and Oxyathres came to relieve them.

 

* * *

 

They bid Eve goodbye when the morning came, some eight guard rotations later—about a day and a half, Calanus estimated.  The monsters of the night had passed with it, to everyone’s relief, and the path out of the mountains lead them into milder but stranger climes—empty theaters, classrooms of students rendered identical in dark-lensed gas masks, joyful expanses of sky piled with downy white clouds, underwater realms of cloying languor.  Waver named what he could, and really, Lysimachus thought, the only thing more entertaining than seeing what future-folk dreamt of was watching the wizard’s reaction to it.  The candy floss forest expression had been, he felt, especially put-upon. 

Delicious stuff, too, though not worth the days they spent lost in it amid ever-increasing fears of sharing Persephone’s fate.  Eumenes finally spotted the pattern, though, and so they emerged into monochrome bustle and the humming of crowds. 

“Tube station,” Waver pronounced as everyone stared at the high arcs of the walls, the broad stairways and stained glass, the gray wash of stone and darker strata of metal, and the hordes of colorless travelers, their features phantom blurs in their busy self-absorption.  “People come to catch trains, which are like the fastest wagon trains you can imagine, only you don’t need horses or oxen to pull them.  If we’re lucky there’ll be a route map around here somewhere.”

“My king, if I may…”  Beside Lysimachus, Peucestas shifted and spoke up.  Alexander, holding Bucephalus’s reins in one hand and looking around in interest, hummed for him to go on.  “Why are we the only ones colored? 

“We aren’t, though!  Look!”  Lysimachus hiked one foot onto a low brick wall and bounced up, gold armor clanking.  He pointed down the new dream’s broad length to the massive flight of stairs at the far end.  In the ascending flow of people, one point of color bobbed in and out of view—the bright yellow gloves of a child being tugged along in her guardian’s wake.

Roxana hopped up beside him, red skirts swirling, and scanned the chamber.  “They aren’t many, but they’re there.” 

Here and there, Lysimachus picked out the others—a woman in an ornate purple dress coming out of a tunnel, a young man in drab greens and browns folding a helmet in his lap as he sat and brooded on a bench, a man in crisp black that stood out far less than the wreath of flowers growing around his head and the whorls of woodgrain on his thin cheeks, and various others more or definitively less human.

“Dreamers, perhaps?” Ptolemy suggested.  “Or dreams themselves?”

“We might ask them,” Roxana suggested.  “Eve did say there were other things living in dreams that were self-aware.”

“Mm,” the king rumbled.  “Let us take advantage of the walls.  Waver, take Calanus and Peucestas and try to find a map.  Thaïs, Ptolemy, Lysimachus, Oxyathres—see if anyone here will speak with us about our journey.  The rest of you spread out a distance and watch for trouble.”

Lysimachus raised his shield with the rest of the companions’ assent then turned to face the crowds.  Thaïs was already headed towards the youth on the bench, and the other two men glanced at one another and headed out into the press of travelers.  The woman in purple had seated herself on a bench just visible past an arch on the left side of the room, which let out onto a platform and darkened tunnel. 

 _None of the gray folk in the crowds have even looked at us since we arrived, so best to talk to others like us,_ he reasoned as he hopped down from his perch and set off in her direction.  As he’d thought, though his path across the chamber was much-jostled and he apologized politely each time, the colorless ones never seemed to acknowledge him beyond a glance and a distracted nod.  He pressed on.

As he arrived, she lowered the small circular box she had been peering at while making minute adjustments to the hat pinned into her swept-back auburn hair.  Closer up, her dress was multi-layered, the skirts full and round, a silver and pearl brooch pinned at the high lace of the collar, the waist pulled so tight that Lysimachus thought he—and if not him, certainly Alexander—could nearly touch fingertips around it.  She was blue-eyed, and the laughter lines at the corners of her mouth were balanced by the girlish upturn at the tip of her noise.  At her expression of polite expectance, he pulled off his helmet and stood to attention. 

“Lady, I’ve come on behalf of my king, the great Alexander of Macedon, Hegemon of the Hellenic League, Shahanshah of Persia, Pharaoh of Egypt, and Lord of Asia.  If you will assent, he would have words with you regarding the journey he now undertakes.”

By the time he’d done speaking, the woman’s eyes were sparkling merrily.

“That’s quite a mouthful, sir,” she said, smiling broadly.  “Is your name also quite so long?”

“Lysimachus of Pella is my name,” he laughed.  “Somatophylax of the king, which is my only title that matters anymore.  May I ask yours?” 

“Alyssa Fredinham,” she answered, standing up to curtsy, “explorer and speaker for Vendavale Heights.  What is it your king wants to discuss?”

“He means to seek out the king of dreams so that our home may be restored.  We lost many of our number when…”  He trailed off, abashed.  “Well, others could explain it better.  The dream we lived in came apart; he will see it restored.  But until these last weeks, we didn’t know where it was we lived in truth, and so we easily become lost.”

“So it’s a guide you need?” she surmised.  “As it happens, I’m headed the same way—and for much the same reasons.  I am sometimes an emissary to Dream’s castle myself, and of late my people have been conferring about taking action before our home meets the same fate as yours has.”

“Are you also Heroic Spirits?” the soldier asked curiously.  “Or do you only live in the dream country, like the lady Eve?”

“We made a bargain with Dream a few ages back and have lived out in the skerries ever since.”  The woman tweaked the folds of her skirt straight and gave him a bright smile, thrusting her hand towards him.  “Charmed to meet you!  If we’re all headed the same way, I don’t see why you shouldn’t come along with me.  Lets go see your king and give it a good chat, shall we?”

Taking her extended hand, he nodded. 

“Then please come with me.”

He escorted her back across the station floor, up into the alcove where Alexander waited, talking animatedly with Hephaestion and pointing to where Waver stood talking to a shrouded figure in a smaller room, its barred opening facing the floor.  The wizard gestured emphatically then looked to the side and nodded, stalking off in the new direction with Peucestas dutifully flanking him and Calanus trailing amicably behind.

Hephaestion saw the two coming first and nudged the king, who turned and blinked in startlement before grinning, a proud look that made Lysimachus beaming back in triumph.  Even above the murmuring hum of the hall, he could hear Leonnatus’s name called in Alexander’s enthusiastic bellow.  The dark-haired soldier appeared at the king’s side, listened and nodded, and slipped easily into the crowd.

“My king!” Lysimachus greeted as he ushered the lady traveler into the alcove.  “I introduce to you the speaker of Vendavale Heights, Alyssa Fredinham, explorer and envoy to the Dream King.”  He stepped to the side and dropped to one knee respectfully, ceding the conversation to the king.

“I see!” Alexander boomed.  “And an envoy can certainly tell us if we’re headed right!”  He crossed his arms and leaned forward in interest.  “Well?  Are we on a good course?” 

“Indeed you are, Your Majesty.”  Alyssa curtsied deeply and smiled back up at Alexander.  “And more than that, you’re on the same heading I am.  Your man here said you were in need of a guide?  I’d be happy to take you on.”

The king laughed at this and fixed the woman with a keen stare. 

“And what would we be repaying you for this service, speaker?”

“When you leave to find the Dream King, take one of my people with you,” she replied promptly, straightening again.  “Dream will have a great deal to reorder when he returns, and Vendavale would like very much to be high on his list of priorities.”

“Why not send someone of your own?” Hephaestion put in, brown eyes watchful.

“No searchers have ever returned,” she answered, shrugging.  “But you look like a stronger lot than most, and a coalition will look good—and the better a showing we make of it, the more likely Dream’s servants are to outfit us with any of their master’s articles of power.”

 _Better words no one could have spoken,_ Lysimachus thought, hiding a grin against his helmet as Alexander rubbed his chin appreciatively at the mention of treasures. 

Behind the soldier and Alyssa, the crowd parted around Leonnatus, returning with Waver and the others in tow.  The wizard scowled. 

“I’d _just_ found the map,” he complained, looking between the king and the newcomer.  “What is it?”

“We may have found better,” Alexander answered.  He looked back to Alyssa.  “How long will your way take us?”

She glanced back at Waver, nodded to him with a minimum of apology, and answered Alexander with, “From here?  Hardly any time at all.  The station is a waypoint—you can go on taking the scenic slog if you like, but the quickest way is to just order a ticket and go by train.”

“And how much do these tickets cost?” Waver asked, crossing his arms.

“Tickets to the heart of the Dreaming cost something close to your heart, of course.”  She winked.  “If you make the trip often, there’s nothing to do but learn to love everything." 

“A physical thing,” Hephaestion wondered, “or something else?”

“It could be something physical,” she allowed, “though you all look like you travel light.  It could be an important memory, or a clever thought, or something of your self.  Something that matters to you, but not so much that the losing of it will kill you.”

At this, silence fell.  The members of the Hetairoi glanced at one another, suddenly ill at ease.  Lysimachus’s grip tightened on his helmet as he watched his king frown.

“The long slog’s probably another ten years,” Alyssa added before he asked, “though it won’t seem that long.  Maybe three, the way we’ll experience it—time in the Dreaming’s funny that way.”

“…I think we’d like a few minutes to talk it over,” Hephaestion told her after a long moment.  “If you don’t mind…?”

“Of course, of course!  I’ll need to get in touch with my contact at the castle anyway, and let them know I may be coming with a group.”  She curtsied to Alexander again.  “Take your time; I’ll be waiting on the bench by the ticket booth.”

“Bring back the others,” Alexander rumbled as she retreated; Hephaestion nodded and strode off into the crowd.  The others drew in closer, uncertain.

“…She is correct that we don’t carry much,” Eumenes said quietly after an awkward silence.  “And the physical things we do have are as much a part of us as any memory—“

“For memory is all they are,” Calanus finished. 

“Then what are we willing to lose in exchange for this?” Philip murmured, eyes downcast and grave. 

“Is the speed worth the loss, my king?”  Perdiccas frowned, looking after Alyssa distrustfully.  Alexander patted Buchephalus’ nose distractedly, not immediately answering.  Roxana chimed in instead, unhappy but brisk.

“You know it is, Perdiccas.  We can’t leave the others lost for that long—we don’t even know if _we’ll_ last for much longer.”  She moved to Alexander’s side; he wrapped one arm around her waist and looked down at her sadly.  She shook her head fondly and reached up to press one hand to his cheek, voice comforting and steady.  “We have a great many memories and all of time to make more.  It is the virtue of a king, to be generous to the faithful.”

He sighed, low and grumbling in his chest. 

“Generosity is not the same as cost,” he complained half-heartedly.

“Maybe not, but they both tally in the same column,” Waver said, also watching their prospective guide with a displeased stare.  He sat down heavily in one of the rows of chairs in the alcove and leaned forward in thought, elbows on his knees. 

Calanus sat down as well, folding into the lotus position as easily as breathing.  He looked contemplative. 

“Memory is important, but still, not one of the four great knowledges,” he mused, looking up at the king.  “So long as the memory is chosen with care not to unseat one’s own foundations, it should be just a momentary imbalance, and one that can be recovered from in time.  And the queen is right—we have all the time that there is.”

“Assuming we survive this escapade,” Perdiccas said sourly, to which Calanus only shrugged in acceptance of the point. 

“Must it be a memory, though?” Peucestas asked, fingers tracing along the edge of his shield.  “The lady did tell us other options.”

“But what does it mean, ‘something of your self?’” Lysimachus asked, looking around at the others helplessly.  “Did she mean to say that we could pay for the travel with—with something like a hand?  An eye?”

“Probably more metaphysical,” Waver muttered, adding under his breath, “This is a dream, not a slasher movie.”  He drummed his fingers on his elbow for a long moment before continuing.  “Something like your voice or the color of your eyes.  They might take a hand if you offered, though.  There are stories out there like that too.”

“That’s something everyone will have to decide.”  Alexander spoke again, solemn.  “I can’t order you on what to give up.”  He kissed Roxana’s temple lightly and told her softly, “I must talk with Hephaestion.  Do you—?”

“It’s fine; go on,” she answered, kissing his chin while it was in reach.  “I want to decide this on my own anyway.”

“Decide what?”  They looked up as Ptolemy returned with Thaïs, Hephaestion and Oxyathres not far behind. 

Lysimachus looked down at the floor again as the others filled the three in on what they’d missed, Alexander quickly taking Hephaestion aside and sitting down with him in a corner. 

 _What can I give up?_ he wondered, running his hands over the ornate golden shell of his helmet, a gift from Alexander years ago after a lion hunt.  _I have no belongings to spare, and I’m too important in the front lines to maim myself.  But what, then?  Memories of my family?  My friendships?  I don’t want to give up those good things—the end of my life was too bitter._

He wracked his mind, thinking of the view from the top of the castle at Pella, where he had stood with Alexander and the others, promising to follow him to the end; of sparring with his brothers; of the faces of his children. 

_Of all the things they could have asked for as a price—!  Why this?_

“I have a proposition.” 

He looked up, surprised, as Thaïs spoke; at the curious looks from the group, she stepped forward into the middle of their loose circle, surveying them all before turning to Waver.

“Waver, can we get wine here?”

He stared at her incredulously for a moment, then rolled his eyes in disbelief as some the others chuckled or smiled.  “I might have known,” he grumbled, but went on.  “Not in the station, no.  But probably on the train.”

“Pity,” she remarked.  “My friends, I think we are looking at this from the wrong perspective.  We are about to make a sacrifice for the sake of our journey.  Such things should be _celebrated._ ”  She turned again, warming to her subject, a radiant smile spreading over her fair features.  “One does not make sacrifices by brooding over how painful the loss will be!  Sacrifices are given in gratitude and hope!  The gods were kind to us, and we give back with joy, thankful for the bounty!”  Her raised fists opened demonstratively as she exhorted them. 

“I propose that each person speak of what they are giving up so that everyone can remember and appreciate its warmth and precious value.  Then, knowing that those things have been justly honored, we resolve to give them up without regret, knowing that they are the proof of our loyalty and determination, and we have no need to grieve for them.

“And then, once we are on our way, we drink until we believe it!” she finished, voice bright with abandon.

Her husband laughed, as did Hephaestion, and there was a snort from Leonnatus that would have been a guffaw from anyone else.  All around the circle, the companions nodded slowly or smiled in approval. 

“Will you begin, my darling?” Ptolemy asked.  “And afterwards we can speak as our resolve comes to us.”

“Is this acceptable, my king?” Thaïs asked in turn, looking to Alexander, who grinned ruefully. 

“It’s a fine idea; as usual, your wisdom outshines everyone’s, hetaera.”  He half-turned to face her, tugging Hephaestion into a loose embrace and falling silent to listen. 

“Then, my king, listen to me as I tell you of my mother.”  Thaïs spread her arms in a low bow to Alexander, then whirled upright.  “A slave and the daughter of slaves, she was but a foreign flute player in the home of a statesman, but the sweetness of her playing and of her demure glance caught the attention of many a visitor during symposiums.  She had several suitors, yet she was provided for, so what need had the girl Hagne to assent to being some guest’s mistress, neither to be on his arm for all to admire as his companion nor to provide citizenship for her children as his wife?  Gifts to her meant little enough until she was given a necklace, golden and filigreed with flowers.”

Thaïs laid one hand over her breast; Lysimachus’s blinked in realization as he spotted the chain of apple blossoms laid over her neck.

“Flowers for a wedding, sacred to Hera,” she went on, shaking her head.  “Can it be a surprise that she thought he meant to wed her?  But perhaps it too was only a thing that had caught his eye in passing, for in the end, he turned her away, and she returned with me to her father and the house he served.”  She smiled archly.  “Luckily for all of us, I was a charming girl, and one to whom our childless master took a fondness.  Ever amused by my questions, and still fond of my mother, he encouraged my education, and so in time I was able to make my own way.

“The day I left the household, my mother passed the necklace on to me.  The words she told me then have guided me ever since.  I shall not give them up, but they would be the same whether or not the necklace had survived her grief or my own travels—it is but a symbol, though a precious one.

“This, then, is the price for my travel.”  Reaching up, she deftly unfastened the clasp of the necklace and held it up; it shone against the gray walls of the station.  “The only physical thing I have left of my mother, Hagne, whose words and whose example have shaped me so much.  I give it up gladly, and know that I was blessed to have had it for so long as I did.”

 _A woman’s story, without a doubt,_ Lysimachus thought as he joined the others in their applause.  _And even if she lays herself bare with it, she’s used it to avoid having to sacrifice a memory.  Would that we could all carry such tokens._

Ptolemy welcomed his wife back into his arms and kissed her temple before taking her place at the center of the circle.  He looked around at the gathered companions and grinned lopsidedly. 

“For my own part, I will sacrifice a small triumph of my later years.  It is no great victory for the ages, perhaps, but it was meaningful to me, and therefore I hope it will suffice.”  He pressed one hand over his breastbone and bowed slightly to Alexander, who leaned closer in interest. 

“There is an anecdote written of me in some of the histories, regarding my sponsorship of education and my pursuit of knowledge.  Some years after our adventures with our king, I founded the great library of Alexandria and welcomed all who would come to learn and teach there.  No stranger was I to those lectures myself, but there was one man whose work presented me with great difficulties—Euclid the mathematician, to whom I myself was patron!”  The old general’s voice sharpened with indignation, at which the other survivors grinned or called out with mock pity.

“His work _Elements_ was too difficult!  Postulates and propositions and proofs; it was maddening!  And when I asked him if there was not some simpler way to understand it, the brazen man dared to tell me that there was no Royal Road to knowledge.  It drove me to distraction.”

“It did,” Thaïs put in, smiling broadly.  “It was all he would talk about for months.”

“As she says,” her husband affirmed, nodding.  “Though I had other duties, I was still _determined_ to master it.  And with the patient explanation of many teachers and my wives’ gracious forbearance, after two years, I finally managed to make proper sense of the damned thing, which everyone was calling a masterpiece, a seminal work.”  He sighed again, this time with deep pleasure.  “Such elegant logic, such simplicity when grasped—truly, it was one of my most satisfying moments. 

“And yet,” he went on, the rueful smile returning to his lips, “I cannot say that my understanding of his works was instrumental to my governance or my victories at war.  It was pride that drove me, and while my epiphanies were of great value to me, it would do my legacy no terrible harm to lose them.  Trusting, then, that our guide has spoken true of surrendering intangible things, this is what I give: the sweet vindication of understanding Euclid.” 

The group applauded again, laughter rising again and talk breaking out as Ptolemy returned to Thaïs’s side.  After a few moments of chatter, Oxyathres took the floor; as he did so, Calanus rose and slipped over to Lysimachus.

“You still look very troubled,” he observed in an undertone, sitting down by the soldier’s side. 

“Yes,” Lysimachus conceded reluctantly.  “The end of my life was misery—full of vanity and treachery.  I prize my memories from before Alexander’s death highly.  I can’t bear to give _any_ up, yet I must in order to go on with all of you.  Advise me, Calanus—how can I possibly find gladness in this?”

The sage listened quietly, watching Oxyathres speak of the coronation of his brother Darius, and finally responded, “Pride is a weight on the soul.  Ptolemy is wise to realize this.”  He looked over at his student, whispering.  “You are more than one moment of your life.  We are all here because of the bond of loyalty shared with Iskandar—and that too is stronger than any one moment.  Whatever you decide, choose it confidently—peace of mind will last you longer in any case.”

“What are you giving up?” Lysimachus asked unhappily.

“My teacher’s understanding, I think.”

Lysimachus stared at him.

“You’ve already decided?”  At Calanus’s nod, he sighed enviously.  “You’re always so quick with these things…”

The Indian smiled and reached over to ruffle the other man’s white hair.  “You only have to know yourself.  You’ll think of something.”

They fell quiet again as Philip moved to the center, and Lysimachus watched, brooding and distant as his companions took their turns, speaking of family and their homes.  Some of them laughed to share the memories, some, though smiling and unrepentant, spoke with tears hanging unshed in their eyes, and others murmured their offerings in voices low and brief, solemn but resolved, and it was in the last that Lysimachus’s own pain gave way to admiration and humility. 

 _Pride is a weight on the soul_ , he thought as stoic Eumenes spoke quietly, eyes cast to the side, of the rare laughter of young Alexander, Roxana’s child, a sound all the more deeply precious for how undeserved it had felt.  _If they can give up such treasures, how can I do less?_

As Eumenes finished and heeded a beckoning gesture and a proud smile from the queen, Lysimachus took a breath and stood, all but the last to take the floor.

“My king,” he said, smiling to Alexander with a heart that might at any moment burst with joy or pain, the feelings too mingled now to separate.  “I still carry the scar from the first lion I slew for you.  The second, you protected me from, reminding me of the injury.  We laughed of that for months but secretly it stung my pride, and each time I anticipated the day I could prove myself.  But I have fought monsters in the desert with you for hundreds of years now, and I no longer have any fear that failing in battle will cause you to think less of me.”  He bowed and finished, voice uneven and heat gathering in the corners of his eyes.

“My king.  For you, I give up the third lion.”

Alexander smiled at him proudly and nodded acceptance, lifting one hand and gesturing him closer.  He came gratefully, submitting to the rough embrace.

“I know how much it means.  Thank you,” said the king into his ear in a voice like far-off thunder.

Lysimachus nodded, a jagged drop of his chin, and released an uneven breath.

“Anything you need,” he said plaintively, resting one arm against his friend’s own as they turned their attention to Leonnatus as he stepped into the circle.

 

* * *

 

Waver stood at Rider’s side on the edge of the platform as the king looked down the tunnel.  In one hand, the magus held a train ticket, running his thumb over the rough-grained surface and trying not to linger on his nagging sense of loss.  As it turned out, telling each other what they intended to give up had not enabled them to cheat the system—though he remembered the group’s pride and resolution, their prices had been forgotten as soon as they’d uttered them to the veiled ticket seller.  A moment of crisis over Bucephalus’s fare had been averted by Alyssa Fredinham pulling off a ring and passing it through the bars with a handwave about favors and teamwork; the mare now stood at the at other end of the platform with Hephaestion, ears flicking in annoyance.

“There will be drink on this train, you say?” Alexander rumbled.

“There should be,” Waver confirmed.  “On a real train they’d probably complain about all fourteen of us wanting to get howling drunk in their dining car, but if they’re like the ticket seller I don’t think they’ll say anything.”

“Good, good.” The king smiled—not as enthused as usual, but calm at least.  “As Thaïs said, a sacrifice should be drunk to.”

“For once I—” Waver began, only to be cut off by Rider straightening suddenly and leaning farther out over the lip of the platform.

“Is that it?!  That light!”

Waver hauled futilely on the back of the bigger man’s cape, glancing down the tunnel at the point of yellow that had appeared in the darkness.

“Yes, it is!  Now get back from the edge or it’s going to splatter you all over the tracks, you big idiot!”

Rider leaned back infinitesimally as other members of the Hetairoi crowded around them, looking curiously down the railway.  Metal clinked and hissed on every side as the long wail of the engine whistle spiraled out ahead of the oncoming behemoth.  Waver flapped a hand at his companions 

“It’s just the train whistle!  Put the swords away!”

There was a contralto chuckle from behind them as Alyssa made her way up to the platform through the waiting crowd of travelers.  Waver gave her an aggrieved look and she raised a politic knuckle to her mouth, studiously looking away to watch the train pull in, which prompted a round of impressed noises from the Hetairoi.  Unlike the rest of the monochrome station, it gleamed with black and gold, _Midnight Express_ painted on the side in gilded lettering.

As the doors opened and an owl-headed conductor stepped out, Alexander strode to the fore, brandishing his ticket.  The dream creature chirped something at him unintelligibly, but he was already ducking in through the door.  

Waver joined the flow of the crowd in, glancing at Alyssa as she fell in beside him.  Her outfit had a Victorian flourish to his eye, which was at least a clue about what year it was outside, and while she didn’t carry an obvious weapon, he strongly suspected that her purse contained a good deal more than makeup and loose bills.

“If I might ask, my lord,” she began, “how is it that you seem so much more knowledgeable about this than the others?  Your dress is more modern too, I see.”

“It’s a long story about a mage war using summoned spirits as proxies and Alexander’s charisma,” he answered shortly, only to be reminded by his inner nineteen year old—and _there_ was an impulse he hadn’t heard from in not-damn-long-enough—that Rider would want the story told.

_Rider would tell it himself if he knew it yet.  God, that’s going to be embarrassing._

He sighed and flashed his ticket at the conductor, who reminded him obscurely of one of his more senile primary school teachers, all white feathers, curiosity and round-eyed, faintly-mad staring.  As he entered, he could see Rider waving at him down the length of the car.

“I’ll tell you more about it once we’re settled in?” he offered Alyssa as he waved back.

“I’ll hold you to it,” she warned, grinning, but nodded. 

He returned the gesture and headed on down the car to the king.  Other members of the Hetairoi crowded around Alexander, looking at their tickets and examining compartment doors.  Gray dream folk slid and edged past obliviously.

“What’s up?” he asked, making his way to Rider’s side.  His king held up the ticket. 

“We are to be separated?” he asked, pointing at the number on his pass.  Waver glanced down at his own—not only were they not consecutive, they weren’t even the same number of digits.  He looked up at the compartments around them.  The plaques above the doors showed numbers, letters, symbols…

He scowled at them in annoyance, then looked back up at Alexander.

“We could just sit in the dining car the whole time?” he offered with a shrug. 

 

* * *

 

The subsequent drunken revelry did not, as Waver had worried it might, break down into moping or mayhem.  The bar taps, the window mechanisms, the spaces between cars, the viewing platform at the back; all of it fascinated Rider and a happy Rider made depression all but impossible, as Waver well knew.  It left him feeling nostalgic, which the train itself seemed to suit, so he didn’t complain when asked to explain whatever he could about their transport.

He told them about steel machinery (what he knew of it, which wasn’t much, though their guide proved more familiar with the topic), about the whistle, about cowcatchers and tracks.

He told them about coal-powered engines and harnessing steam, about economies powered by the fleetness of the trade, the hundreds of miles you could cross in a single day.

He tried to tell them, at least a bit, about taking the train out to the sea as a boy, crisscrossing leylines and listening to his father and grandmother debate about the efficiency of technology versus magic, and which had the lower cost over time.  That it was the fastest he’d ever travelled at the time he hardly needed to tell them, for that they could feel on their own.  The topic of speed got him onto airplanes, though, and so it all started again.

The gray folk came and went, sometimes without the train even stopping, gradually decreasing in number.  Night and day ceased having any meaning at all as they barreled onward through dreams—clubs and courthouses, hellscapes and battlefields, crumbling brick towers and alien silver spires.

“I wouldn’t have expected there to be so much of it, with Morpheus gone,” he commented some hours (or days or years) into the journey, nursing a whiskey on the rocks as he watched the worlds pass by outside.

“Dreamers don’t stop dreaming, Lord El-Melloi II,” Alyssa returned, nibbling restlessly at a speared olive from her martini.  “But without him it won’t last.  And none of it has the weight it should."

Waver snuck a glance at her; she stared out the window with a distant gaze, a troubled line on her forehead. 

“We’ll find him,” he said quietly.  “Whatever has him doesn’t have a chance.”

She shot him a rueful smile and nodded, tipping up her glass in toast. 

“I’m quite sure you’re right."

Not long after, they finally pulled into a station.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second chapter arrives! I’d hoped to finish the Dreaming arc in time for a one-month-since-posting update, but it didn’t quite work out. In the future, I think my plan will be to update the major sections once a month while filling the time in between with short stories (which I will have at least two of in the month to come).
> 
> Thanks to [Megkips](http://archiveofourown.org/users/megkips) for the suggestions, pre-readings and encouragement; she is as ever my enabler in all things Fate/Zero. In particular it was her catch that Oxyathres could not have been Muslim because Alexander the Great’s lifetime was about 300 years too early for that; he should be Zoroastrian. There has been a slight change in the prologue to correct this, but apologies if it threw anyone. You’d think that would be the sort of thing I would have noticed when researching the history of the practice of facing Mecca during prayer, and yet.
> 
> I’ve added Noble Phantasm names and notable Abilities to the [cast list](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14m4LJmFS1IhfarWgWlGH6x1UDdHt5zluyw416JOkfnk/edit?usp=sharing), if anyone’s curious. For now I'm leaving the details to be touched on in the fic as and when they become relevant, though, so feel free to ignore it as desired. Thanks for reading!


	3. Sidestory One - At the Cave of Eve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ptolemy and Thaïs express their love via Plato references.

Unlike the others, Ptolemy kept watch some yards back from the lip of the cave’s outcropping, surveying the horizon with a sovereign satisfaction and his hands folded neatly behind his back.  Thaïs smiled to herself as she slipped up to the mouth of the cave.  Her husband of old held no weapon and stood wholly at ease, yet surprising him would be the last mistake an unwary nightmare would ever make.  She cleared her throat and raised her voice to call out to him.

“Who gives peace on earth and calms the stormy deep.  Who stills the winds—“

“—and bids the sufferer sleep,” the general finished, chuckling and looking over his shoulder, stretching one arm out towards her.  Gathering up the pleated edges of her green peplos, she crouched and leapt fluidly, easily clearing the ground between then.  He deftly tugged her up to his front and circled his arms around her waist. 

“It is love, of course.  But do you know,” he murmured reflectively, “I think I prefer Phaedrus’ reading, abandoned as it was in the end.”  His eyes slipped closed as he recited softly into her ear, “‘Love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.’”

“Agathon was well-meaning, and Diotima insightful, but neither had seen as many battlefields as you,” she teased lightly, tipping her head back against his.  “Yet your guard is over, and your relief waiting.  I suggest we retire and discuss which spoke the plainest wisdom.”

He laughed again, warm and low, and passed one hand outward in a wide, inviting arc.  All across the ground in front of him, sigils flared with a pale blue light; as he made a loose fist and flicked his fingers downward they scattered and dispersed like so many droplets of water.

“You tempt me, beloved, but to my grief I have already decided what my reading shall be until such time as I am needed.  You are as ever welcome, of course.”  So saying, he stepped back and again offered her his arm.

She threaded her hand past his robes and rested it over his forearm, turning with him and walking back towards the cave.

“We shall see,” she replied, nodding to Waver as they crossed paths.  “What is it that you have chosen to read over Plato?”

“Another old favorite,” he said in droll voice as they stepped inside, weaving past the other companions.  There Alexander and Roxana and Hephaestion, all laying in a great pile and resting; there, Calanus stripped to the skin and deep in meditation, Lysimachus kneeling beside him in imperfect imitation; and the others all gathered in small groups, testing sleep or talking softly.  They made their way to a clear space near the cool green flame Waver had left hovering in the air at the cave’s center.  Once nestled together against a wall, he raised up one hand, chanting with low resonance.

“Open, o ye fastness of knowledge, and bestow upon me wisdom.”

The firelight hue cast the opening of the Gate of Alexandria in rippling shades of verdigris, as over Ptolemy’s shoulders and head the memory of the great library he had founded offered up the work of philosophers and scribes from ages long past.  Thaïs straightened up, picking them out of the air and tucking them in crook of her elbow.  More and more emerged, all bound with ribbons or tucked safely in cases.  She glanced at the spare flow of writing along one which identified it as Aristotle’s _On Dreams_.  Smiling with realization, she passed it down to her husband and, as the Noble Phantasm closed, curled back up against him.

“I thought that, as we finally have come to a period of rest, I might aid our king in a way more observable than only the support of my presence,” he explained.  She nodded, smiling.

“And the topic of today’s symposium?”  She picked up another scroll at random and glanced at the label.

“Of course, that would be the nature and meaning of dreams.  Perhaps we may gather information that will prove—”  Ptolemy paused as his wife stuck a scroll beneath his nose, then shot her a questioning look.  She smiled at him coyly.

“Lets trade,” she offered.  “Aristotle is one thing; Hindu holy texts still in Sanskrit are quite another.”

He bowed his head in acquiescence, smirk tugging at his lips.  “As you wish.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The above is what happens when the greater bulk of your cast has an extensive education in the Greek classics. I apologize to the majority of my readers who cannot make the same claim. The opening dialogue is in reference to Plato's _Symposium_ , which purports to discuss the nature, origin, and purpose of love via (fictitious) speeches from seven different men attending a party. Phaedrus's speech opens the debate by framing love as the desire to impress one's beloved; Socrates is the last person to speak on the topic and relates a lesson he learned from one Diotima of Mantinea on the love and pursuit of wisdom. (And then Alcibiades wanders in to drunkenly rant at Socrates for breaking his heart, lest you think the work was entirely pious and high-minded.) _Symposium_ can be read [here](http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html) by those who wish to expand their knowledge of the origin of Platonic love. 
> 
> Meanwhile, Calanus the naked philosopher is the only person in this group more pants-averse than Rider. I appreciate the drama CD insert art's decision to have one random shirtless dude in the Hetairoi giving me the opportunity to use him.
> 
> Gate of Alexandria is a completely unrepentant riff on Gate of Babylon. Blame [megkips](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Megkips/pseuds/Megkips). It gives Ptolemy access to any text that was ever stored within the library's walls for the entire time it stood—quite a body of work, given that the library's demand for papyrus was so immense that other parts of the world had to develop parchment to compensate for the shortage.


	4. Dreaming - Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morpheus and the desert are both missing, and Rider is determined to find the Dream King's castle (whether to get answers or new territory is yet to be determined; he's flexible). But the Dreaming is a big place, and for all that they've lived there for centuries, the Hetairoi still have no idea what they're getting into.

Crowding around the window with the others, Waver peered out at the small city skyline rising up above the edge of the station’s roof.  He could see chimneys and high gables decorated with gingerbread boarding beneath the eaves, the walls painted in bright colors or meticulously placed in brick.  Above, the sky was cloudless and blue; he thought for a moment that it looked too solid to be a dream, right up until he noticed that the sunlight cast no shadows.

“Well, shall we?” asked Alyssa brightly, adjusting her gloves.  “Even with Dream out of commission, there are plenty of sights to see.  And protocol being what it is, we’ll have a day or two to kill anyway.”

Rider rumbled approval—though he’d been irked at the suggestion that the king would have to wait for an audience with servants, the new locale seemed reward enough to placate him.  Or, Waver thought, eyeing him suspiciously, he was just biding his time and staying cheerful until then.  It could be hard to tell.

“We were told there is a library?” Ptolemy asked as the group spilled out onto the new platform, open-air and clear of other passengers.  At the other end, a burly, elephant-headed porter was attempting to wrestle Bucephalus out of the freight car, ears folding back in annoyance as the mare stood lock-limbed and unyielding.  Alexander chuckled fondly and walked off to reclaim his mount. 

Alyssa laughed as well, turning back to Ptolemy and nodding.

“Dream has a magnificent library.  Shall we go and see it after we’ve settled in?”

“A library already, Ptolemy, _must_ we?” Lysimachus cut in as Waver opened his mouth to point out their lack of luggage.  “We’re finally in Dream’s city and the very first thing you want to look at is scrolls.  What about landmarks?  What about statues?  What about the people?”

“Do not accuse me of your lack of culture, Lysimachus,” Ptolemy replied tartly.  “A library is the storehouse of a civilization—in this case perhaps _all_ of civilization.  Every minute I am not in that building is one more minute closer to us leaving this place, perhaps to never return.”

“Then ask a few years as your boon from the dream king once we rescue him,” Roxana put in frankly.  “I want to see more of the place too.”

“Do I need to remind all of you that none of this sight-seeing matters until we’ve settled our objectives?” Perdiccas asked in a tone of strained patience.

Waver cast his eyes upward in silent appeal, looking over his shoulder as Rider returned with Bucephalus, looking curiously at his bickering followers.

“We’re arguing about what to do first,” Hephaestion informed him with a rueful grin.

The king laughed proudly at this, slapping the closest person on the back.  This was Waver, who staggered and glared daggers as Rider said cheerfully, “It is good to be eager!  But let us see the palace and make our showing first.”

This quieted the debate and they fell into a marching formation, Alexander at the head, riding with Roxana out of the station.  The city, like Alyssa, looked Victorian, all fretwork-heavy houses and vertical lines, a few three-wheel motorcars dotting the cobbled streets.  A few times they passed horse-drawn carriages, around which Bucephalus flattened her ears and nickered in dislike.  Walking briskly along the king’s left side, Alyssa chatted with Alexander about the city, pointing out residences of various dwellers of the Dreaming’s capital—the librarian’s family’s home here, a court fashion designer’s shop there, and so forth. 

At the street level, the fraying at the seams was more obvious—places where the stones in the streets lay out of their well-patterned alignment, or spaces on house walls on which the decorations abruptly became simpler before reverting to more ornate fretwork.  Their guide led the group around such areas deftly. 

It was all more mundane than Waver had been expecting, even excepting the odd zones, but given some of what they’d passed through already, the normalcy was a relief.  Still, he kept watchful, noting the looks of curiosity and interest on the—again entirely normal—faces of those they passed by.  A few more enthusiastic sorts cheered for them, at which Alexander beamed, laughing and waving.

The road lead them gradually upward until the line of buildings fell away and the palace could be seen, blue and white and sprawling its multistoried broad halls in a loose square.  Visible past the front building, a tower rose up from somewhere along or inside the estate’s back wall.  A huge garden and long iron fence separated it from the rest of the city; they proceeded up to the gate house, its entrance decorated with the heraldic images, painted on the white stones, of a griffon, a hippogriff and a wyvern.  The guards at the gate stared at Alexander and his retinue with poorly-hidden eagerness as the captain spoke with Alyssa and Waver wondered exactly how much she’d told whoever her contact was here about Rider’s intentions. 

The gate was opened hurriedly and the group continued on up the broad walk, passing beneath vine-bedecked arbors and between long rectangular garden plots.  Waver couldn’t even begin to identify the flowers—intricate arrangements of overlapping petals, stamens bursting out of cupped centers, hues by turns vibrant and delicate, solid-colored blossoms mixed in with those of almost animal-like patterns in dark splotches or stripes.   Ahead of him, Roxana pointed down at a brilliant purple specimen with heavy, ruffled petals shading to hot fuschia around a deep indigo center; Alexander leaned down as they passed and plucked it with a conqueror’s heedlessness of the concept of “other peoples’ property,” tucking it into his wife’s dark hair. 

Waver rolled his eyes as Roxana laughed and kissed the king on the jaw; she only encouraged him, but it wasn’t as if he needed much of it.  Or any at all.

They were approaching something like a leyline node; he could sense the faint hum of it beneath his feet as they walked.  It felt old, or dormant—it wasn’t like he had an educated expectation of what the center of the Dreaming should feel like, but something a little stronger than this, anyway.  Weak because Morpheus was missing, maybe?  He filed the thought away.

The towering doors had already been opened before they began mounting the shallow steps; by the time they’d reached the top of the stairs, watched with keen attention by the guards atop the battlements, a clutch of attendants was waiting.

“Representative Alyssa Fredinham of Vendavale Heights and party?” the leader asked, stepping forward—an old man with crabbed hands and white brows hanging into alert blue eyes, dressed in impeccable butler’s black.  His voice surprised Waver; he’s been expecting the quaver of long-advanced age, but the man’s intonation was as steady and resonant as scales played on a cello, and pitched nearly as deep besides. 

The woman in question laughed.

“You’d better call it, ‘Alyssa Fredinham and Emperor Alexander of Macedon and party,’” she responded.  “Though even then he probably ought to get first billing.  But yes, that’s us.  Nice to see you again, Bertram.  What’s our waiting time looking like?”

“Many have come to petition the household for aid.”  The old man bowed.  “However, we have done what we can to hasten affairs.  Only those whose need is most dire remain ahead of you.  We anticipate that you will have your audience by sundown.”  He turned to Alexander and bowed even deeper.  “We profoundly apologize for the slight, Your Majesty.  Only the cases of imminent life and death have been given precedence.”

Alexander leaned down, elbow on one knee, and grinned predatorily.  “As payment, I demand that my men be taken to see anything they wish today, and that we be given your finest accommodations while we are here.” 

“As you say, Your Majesty.”

“Well then,” the king proclaimed jovially, looking back at his followers.  “What do you all want to see?”

“The library.”

“The city!”

“We could always just vote on it,” Waver said with little hope as Ptolemy and Lysimachus glowered at each other.

Alexander guffawed, dismounting.  “This is a safe place?” he asked Alyssa, and when she nodded in amusement, went on.  “Then go and see whatever sights you wish.  Be back here before nightfall to discuss matters of strategy.”

“Yes, my king!” the two chorused, grinning.  Ptolemy extended one arm towards Thaïs, who accepted it with a regal nod.  Laughing, Lysimachus did the same for the queen, who gigged, leaned down from the saddle to kiss Rider’s temple, then hopped down and wrapped her fingers around his companion’s arm.

The others divided up—Waver shook himself out of the mental image of Rider as a fairy godmother and moved with Oxyathres to the library group as Calanus joined his student and Roxana.  Hephaestion stayed with Rider, of course, as did Eumenes and Perdiccas, the latter still watching the locals with a measure of distrust.  Alexander sized up the groups with an experienced glance, then looked over the three who hadn’t made a clear move to join anyone.

“Philip, go with the explorers, in case they get themselves into any scrapes,” he said, grinning at Lysimachus’s expression of exaggerated affront.  “Leonnatus, for your lack of clanking armor, go and keep an eye on the library group.  And Peucestas, for your peerless sacred shield, remain with me.”

The three men nodded assent and joined their respective parties.  Alexander smiled at them with satisfaction and patted Bucephalus’s neck as he turned back to the butler.

“Now then.  Where will we be stabling my horse?”

 -

The library, Waver had to admit, was stunning—four stately levels, well-organized floor plan, tall windows which welcomed in the sunlight, and a huge dome over the lobby, up through which the sound of his hard-soled shoes on the tile had rung like a vesper bell.  The distant sound of such footsteps echoed throughout the place, fading into the background like a quietly clicking clock. 

The innovation of books—as opposed to papyrus scrolls—had delighted Ptolemy, who had set off immediately to find whatever he could on the early history of mankind.  _Who sired our peoples, and what did they build and believe that they wished to outlive them?_ he had posed to the group inquisitively.  Neanderthals, Waver suspected, were going to come as something of a shock.

For their parts, Oxyathres and Thaïs had gone together to see what they could turn up on the course of history for Persia and Greece respectively, curious about how their homes and cultures had fared after their lifetimes and hungry for more details than Waver, always more interested in methodology than history, could provide.

The magus himself, though deeply tempted by the thought of researching the Root in what was undoubtedly the finest library in which he or any other mage would ever set foot, had resolved to educate himself on the seven Endless, Dream’s siblings.  Anyway, it didn’t take much soul-searching to admit he’d been more interested in the “no other mage” part than the Root itself. 

That, Waver reflected as he walked among the stacks, was tantamount to blasphemy for someone of his magical tradition.  He smirked at the thought—of all the invective he’d had hurled his way in his life, no one could ever say he was too traditionalist. 

_The History of Religion on Green Earth, Eclipse: The Nature of the Moons and their Worship…  Must be getting close._

He slowed, looking over the shelves.  They soared upward, rows and rows of titles boasting of sociological studies of this or that system of worship or long discourses on the development of religion in some place he’d never heard of.  He moved down the aisle, eyes sweeping over titles like God Kings of the Sculptor Galaxy and Forgotten Children: The Prophets of the Silver Coin.  Frowning, he backtracked, but on the other side of the religious books were philosophy ones.  It was admirably thorough and all, but while he _might_ be able to find what he needed in intergalactic cultural treatises, it’d be a hell of a lot easier to do with books written by _Earthlings._

 _Maybe it’s arranged spatially somehow._ He squinted up to the topmost shelves and, unable to make out the lettering on the bindings, looked around for a rolling ladder.  Spotting one on the next aisle, he dragged it back over.  In spite of the well-polished gleam of the wood, something in one of the wheel casings ticked and caught insistently, sending the thing into hapless spins in either direction every time Waver jerked the ladder.  Finally he wrangled it into position and scaled it impatiently.

He skimmed the titles of the topmost shelf and frowned, trying to ignore the first cold needle of apprehension.  _Myths of the Early West, When the Moons Met, Moon Worship in the Modern Galactic Community…_   He scanned the floor from atop the ladder.

_All right, so lets say it’s a universal layout.  Where’s Earth from here?  Hell, I’m no astronomer.  What a time to not have Aristander._

_Is this place even big enough to have as many libraries as there are intelligent races in the_ universe?  _That can’t be right.  It’s—_

“Lord El-Melloi II.”  From below, Leonnatus’s voice broke into his thoughts.  The soldier seemed calm at a glance, but then, he’d always been one of Alexander’s most unflappable companions.  Waver took the ladder down two rungs at a time and landed in a flapping of red coat.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, gripped with paranoia.

“The lady Thaïs and Prince Oxyathres wish to speak with you.”

“Can’t find anything on the Mediterranean?” Waver guessed, hoping to hear anything else—but the other man just nodded, watching him closely.  “Lets find Ptolemy.  I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

They met the other two on the stairs up to the next level.  Thaïs took one look at him and turned to face him fully. 

“You think something’s wrong.”

“I’m worried something’s not right,” he half-agreed.  “I can’t find what I’m looking for either.  What’d you two come across instead of what you wanted?”

“Ptolemy is on the next floor,” Leonnatus said quietly and lead the way up the stairs as Thaïs and Oxyathres began exchanging unfamiliar titles—histories of places Waver _had_ heard of, but only because he’d been staring at them in confusion barely two minutes ago.  He nodded when they paused and looked at him questioningly.

“There are a lot of things I could be missing—it’s a library in a dream kingdom; it’s not like I’m familiar with it—but if this is their _only_ one and there’s not more of it than there looks, there’s no way it’s big enough to house multiple _species’_ worth of knowledge.”

“Perhaps the Dream King has a preference?” Oxyathres ventured, sounding unconvinced.

Waver followed Leonnatus around a row of shelves, spotting Ptolemy sitting at a reading table with books spread all around him.  He’d clearly found something of interest, but then, Waver had deduced long ago that Ptolemy would read nearly anything.

“If the Dream King liked the Sculptor Galaxy so much then why does his _city_ look so—”  He broke off, halting mid-step, realization gaping open a black maw.

 _Victorian.  Fuck._ Fuck, _I had it the wrong way around!  The real world isn’t Victorian;_ Vendavale Heights is.

“A trap.  It was a _trap_ ,” he said, voice thin with fury, then, “We have to get back to Rider.”

Across the floor, Ptolemy glanced up, a look of interest giving way to one of puzzlement before it seized with alarm and he pushed himself to his feet.  Leonnatus, following his stare over Waver’s shoulder, drew his sword in a ringing blur.

“Too late…” Thaïs breathed as Waver spun around to stare at the empty space where Oxyathres had been standing.

The background echo of footsteps in the lobby swelled into a cacophony of clanking and hissing as, on every side, shelves shifted and steam and clockwork machinery burst from the walls.

-

Alexander sighed enviously as they moved deeper into the castle, following Alyssa and the servants. 

“Good to be in a palace again?” Hephaestion guessed from beside him, grinning. 

“I’d never want to live in only one place, but this would make a good base,” the king confirmed, slowing as they traversed the garden inside the enclosed quadrangle of the halls to admire its high, ornate fountain. 

“The desert defines us, but stone walls have their benefits,” his friend surmised.  “Comfort?  Servants?  Good food?”

“All of it!”  Alexander sighed heavily again.  “Hephaestion, I look forward to being in the real world again, in spite of everything.”

“It won’t be long now,” the blond man reassured him, knocking him fondly on the arm.  “And we’ll be able to see all those things our wizard’s told us about.”

“I’m looking forward to it!  I would like to try flying, I think.”

“You would,” his friend answered, laughing. 

The walk took them to the back wall and up into the center tower, graced with a wide curve of shallow stairs that lead into a broad room tiled in brown and gold and accented with green.  Chandeliers hung from the ceiling and a single gilded pillar stretched up from the center of the floor to the ceiling.  Tall windows lined three of the walls, overlooking the city. 

“The ballroom,” Alyssa explained, walking along one wall, fingers trailing over the ornate flourishes in the carved wood.  She added wistfully, “There used to be dances here, before Dream disappeared.” 

“Be preparing it for a feast, then,” Alexander told her confidently as he and the others filtered in, looking around.  “We will return with Morpheus and gather here to tell the tale of it!”

“We’ll have it ready,” she promised, turning to face him and leaning on the wall, hands pressing lightly against the panel behind her.  A cold and distant look had come into her eyes; Alexander opened his mouth to ask after it, suddenly aware of the thud of his heartbeat as an electric frisson coursed through him.

“Move the king below,” the butler intoned from behind him.  “Drop the others down three levels—we don’t want them too close.” 

“Your Majesty!”  Oxyathres’s voice and the flurry of his robes, a scent of cardamom and bronze scale as the Persian appeared between him and the center of the room.  As Alexander drew his sword, he caught just a glimpse of the treacherous servant, standing with one hand placed on the center pillar, before the tiles in the floor upended in a shriek of stone and metal and he plummeted.  His flailing arm scraped uneven machinery and snagged in cloth—he jerked at it only to hear his companion curse.  They struck the ground in a rough clatter of armor on metal plates and leapt up to their feet, weapons in hand. 

Dirty yellow lamps flickered to life around them, illuminating a circular chamber that reverberated and hummed with activity hidden behind the copper walls.  No sign remained of the room above but a ring etched in the ceiling, which, as Alexander’s eyes fell on it, rotated of its own accord and lit up with a dark, earthy green glow. 

“What is the meaning of this?!” he bellowed, the volume rattling the walls, setting his back to Oxyathres’s.

No door opened, no grate appeared, but all the same Alyssa’s voice drifted down to him from above, crackling and distorted. 

 "I am sorry, King Alexander.  But what I told Lysimachus at the station is still true—Vendavale Heights is in danger.  Without Dream around to sync us up again, we’re falling behind the world.  Not enough people dream of this era anymore for it to support us, so we’ve had to find other ways.”

“Traitor!”  He threw the sword upward, end over end, but even with all of his strength it didn’t so much as scratch the circle; he ducked as the weapon rebounded back and fell to the floor.

“Not to _my_ people, and as much as I enjoyed the train ride, I don’t owe any loyalty to yours,” she continued, the edges of the sound staticky and metallic.  “But if it’s any comfort, I knew the moment I saw you that you were going to be strong enough to last us for _years_.  It should be a very long time before we have to move on to one of your friends.

“I’m sorry about Oxyathres.  Of course you understand that we can’t risk cracking that cell open now to pull him out, or weakening the barrier.  We have too much respect for your strength for that.  In that light, I’d advise you to not spend too much time shouting at me, because I doubt he’s going to have very long.”

Above the chamber, the light in the ceiling brightened, mingling snakelike and green with the shadows from the lamps.  Alexander sucked in a breath as the impact of it struck him—a sickly feeling of weakness that washed over him like a foul tide. 

Behind him, hands clenched around his spear, Oxyathres fell to one knee. 

 -

Half an hour of assailing the walls with fist, shield and spear had yielded no results beyond headaches from the noise.  Perdiccas struck the dark surface once more, frustrated, then looked back at Eumenes.

“Any luck?”

The king’s secretary looked up from where he knelt over an elegant inscription of glowing white script on the floor.  He shook his head once.

“It isn’t getting through,” he answered, voice low and clipped.  “It’s being blocked somehow, but I don’t know on which end.”  He passed one pale hand over the words, which vanished; the two of them and Peucestas looked to Hephaestion expectantly.

The blond stood with his head half-bowed, middle finger tapping a rapid staccato beat on the shaft of his longspear.  The other three waited for an order—coming from Hephaestion it would, of a certainty, be the same their king would issue if he knew their plight.

They had plummeted some thirty feet into darkness lit by erratic flashes of lightning blue.  Eumenes had, he told them, managed to catch hold of something on the wall, but with a metallic grinding it had bitten deeply into his fingers—Perdiccas had caught a brief glimpse of the bloodied skin when the secretary had tried to get word to Alexander.  Now they waited in the pit as sparks fell from twisted clumps of wire running along the walls and ceiling in a space perhaps ten feet on a side, the air oppressively close and reverberating with a distant thrumming.

“Eumenes,” Hephaestion said at last, anger simmering low in his voice; the dark-haired man looked at him expectantly.  “Try to get a message through to Lysimachus or Ptolemy.  Maybe they’ve found a way out we haven’t, or avoided capture entirely.  Perdiccas, once someone comes to see us, they’re yours.  Confuse them so much they can’t tell if they should be trying to kill us or give us a parade.  Once we’re out, we look for the leader.”

“Not the king?” Peucestas asked in concern. 

“Not yet.”  The other shook his head.  “It’s the first thing they’ll expect, and it’ll be guarded.”

“So will their leader,” Perdiccas said sourly, but added, “but once I get to him it won’t matter.”

Hephaestion nodded affirmation.  “We find whoever’s in command and we bring him to the king for judgment.”  He smiled, a hard turn of his lips that, as another flurry of sparks showered to the floor, exposed the white gleam of his teeth.

 _And then it’s all done but the razing,_ Perdiccas thought, watching Eumenes trail his fingertips over the floor, leaving brightly illuminated lines of text.  _Just like Thebes._   _The fools._

The missive burned against the floor, unfading, and after a few seconds, Eumenes’s lips tightened and he dismissed it.  As he moved his hand up to begin afresh, a voice filtered into the room, crackling and shot through with loud pops.

“Followers of King Alexander,” the voice recited—male, Perdiccas thought as he and the others straightened and looked around, but not that of the servant from before, “out of respect we’ll keep this brief.  Vendavale Heights needs the power of dreams to survive.  With the King of Dreams gone, we’ve had no choice but to find other avenues to provide that power, and the dream that you and your king represent is extremely potent.  However, it’s King Alexander’s wish that in exchange for his good conduct you be spared; we’ll comply so far as we can, but it requires your cooperation as well.”

Hephaestion’s eyes had narrowed at the frankly ridiculous suggestion that Alexander the Great would submit under such weak-willed and faithless terms.  Ire sparked afresh in Perdiccas, and when the king’s second gestured him to the center of the room, he nodded and stepped forward without hesitation.

“You will be kept here for—”

“Kept _here?_   That is absurd.” Perdiccas interrupted, the words harsh and cold.  “You must have misheard your commander completely.”

As he spoke, he remembered, let the images wash over him and empower his voice.

_—Alexander lying on his deathbed, a complex smile tugging at the corners of his mouth—regretful, resigned, ruthless, mirthful; it is too many things for Perdiccas to make sense of, the smile of a demigod with concerns and thoughts on a level above those of other men, or perhaps only the smile of a man who can see his death clearly._

_He kneels at the king’s side, grief for his friend warring with urgent concern for the future of the empire._

_“Alexander,” he pleads, “you must tell us something.”  Guilt, unreasoning and irrational, burns in his stomach, the sense that by accepting the king’s death he encourages it, but there is no time for such indulgence, not anymore._

_One broad hand lifts, and Perdiccas’s heart leaps painfully into his throat—foolishness, foolishness, but at a time like this every movement seems overburdened with meaning.  He swallows with effort and, as Alexander beckons him closer, gingerly rests one hand on the king’s shoulder and leans in._

_The mingled smell of rank perspiration and sweet hellebore almost overwhelms him; his breath catches shallowly as his friend, his monarch, his patron breathes into his ear._

_“To the strongest.”_

_Warm metal touches his hand, which he closes convulsively; he pulls back enough to look down at Alexander’s ringless fingers, caught desperately at the edge of withdrawing.  The king’s signet ring is heavy in Perdiccas’s palm, and the king smiles winsomely as his eyes close._

_‘The strongest?’  Craterus?  Alexander, what does—?  Alexander—_ Alexander! _”_

 _H_ e opened his eyes and glared at the ceiling, where the voice had faltered. 

"What _are_ your orders?” he needled.  “Because they surely were not to leave high-ranking prisoners of war rotting in a cramped pit like this.” 

Alexander’s last order had been given to Perdiccas, but the words were a puzzle, a test—or maybe Perdiccas had only wanted them to be.  The weight of the ring in his hand, of power in his hand, still burned with the memory of uncertainty and temptation—had the king’s last words been a riddle, a final carefree jest from a man who could never be made to think seriously of any farther in the future than the next campaign?  Or had he wished with his last conscious breath for Craterus, his finest general, to take command, only for Perdiccas to willfully obscure that dying behest?

The empire had fallen either way.

 _Let it be so here as well,_ he resolved, with all the weight of a Noble Phantasm’s power behind it. 

“Bring us to your leader,” he ordered.  “He will tell you what to do from there.”

The man outside—whatever outside meant—stammered out an assent and the voice snapped abruptly into silence.  The survivors of the Hetairoi glanced at one another as a rhythmic pounding began behind the wall, a yellow line of illumination crawling across the dulled metal panels to expose a widening crack in the shape of a doorway.

“Take them or follow?” Peucestas whispered fleetly.

“Follow,” Hephaestion responded, waving a hand to dismiss his spear and grinning.  “Lets go _negotiate_.”

-

Waver pressed his fingers along a seam in the corroded wall, scowling at the faint hiss of steam that shot past his fingers.  Looking through the crack showed nothing, so he stepped back and gestured.  At his side, the ball of mercury sent out a feeler, sliding over the wall and extending into the space beyond. 

“Well?  What is it finding?”  Ptolemy asked from behind him.  He shook his head, concentrating. 

The feeler had stopped only a few inches outside the wall; the sense of prana contact rippled back to him over the bond with the Mystic Code.  Volumen Hydragyrum drew back the feeler and instead began curving it over the outside surface of the cell.  Extending her mass further, she spread out like a puddle of water, creeping outward in all directions.

“She’s checking the outside,” he explained, turning to face his companions.  “The containment spell’s just a little bigger than the cell; I’m looking for whatever they’re using to ground it, or any weaknesses it has.”

A silver bead oozed through a rusted gap in the ceiling and formed itself into a long droplet which bent in the middle and tilted back up.  Waver waved at it briefly and it withdrew.  The others followed his glance, looking around as the Mystic Code poked into the room again on the other side of the cell, then up from a corner area of the floor.  Waver frowned.  He moved back to the wall and rested one hand on it, focusing his will. 

_What’s the room built in?  A space between walls is one thing, but we should have hit plaster or something above and below.  A room’s not just a cube floating in space._

In response to the thought, Volumen Hydragyrum expanded sharply—a field of short spikes shooting outward like puffer fish spines.  Every one of them ground to a halt at the same distance out—the containment spell again, and between it and the cell, just empty air. 

“Well?” Ptolemy repeated, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.  Waver opened his eyes and shook his head, aware of his own baffled expression.

“That doesn’t make any sense.  There’s _nothing_ out there—no walls, no—no suspension cables, no nothing.  Not even anything to be producing all the steam.  It’s like we’re in…”  He trailed off, awful suspicion rising.  “Like a Reality Marble,” he began again, slowly dropping down to sit on the floor, staring at it intently as his mind reeled.  Volumen Hydragyrum, registering his distress, reformed beside him; he patted her distractedly.  “A sealed space inside the world.  If they tried to do it out in the real world it’d fall apart in minutes, but inside a dream…  If they can control the surroundings to that extent, it’s a perfect prison.  We couldn’t break the walls because aside from the shell there’d be nothing to break.  The prana out there wouldn’t be a containment spell; it’d be literally the edge of the world.  None of us have anything strong enough to break through that.”

“But then how did a jailer come and speak to us before?”  Thaïs pointed out, sitting austerely beside Ptolemy.

_That’s—a good question._

Waver turned to look at the small door hatch and the radio speaker embedded in the wall beside it.  He turned the problem over in his head. 

“All right…” he said slowly.  “If it is like a Reality Marble, then…  Rider could summon one person from the Hetairoi without manifesting it completely— _and_ he could communicate with that one even if _he_ was inside the Marble.  So we know they can have points of contact with the outside world.  It has to be something like that.  They make a point of contact when they want to talk to us.”

“Then our moment to strike is when they come to speak with us,” Leonnatus surmised from where he leaned on the wall in the corner. 

“…I’d say a point of contact doesn’t guarantee that the shell of the world’s any weaker, but _she_ already proved we don’t have necessarily have to bash the wall down,” Waver said, jerking a thumb at Thaïs, who smiled smugly. 

“Even the perfect prison is run by men,” she agreed. 

 _And you could talk the crest off an archmage,_ Waver thought.  She could certainly convince some unsuspecting guard that a group of spirits, practically immortal, nonetheless needed to eat. 

“They will have to open at least a small gate to slip through food and water,” the woman went on.  “ _That_ is when we strike.”

And so nearly an hour after the library had transmuted into a corroded cell hissing steam at the seams, the door hatch in the side wall cracked open.

Ptolemy’s trap wards glowed to Waver’s enchanted sight, one laid down every foot to form a ring hugging the walls.  Volumen Hydragyrum rippled in a waiting circle around his feet and behind him Leonnatus slowly drew out his sword with a sound like satin falling.

A tray slid past the hatch and Waver nodded as a ward flared.

_Good caution, but not good enough._

Fire hot enough to melt steel exploded in the space Ptolemy had marked and someone outside screamed.  Waver pointed forward as Leonnatus glided past him like a thrown dagger.

“Scalp!”

Volumen Hydragyrum arced through the air in a silver flash; the assortment of choked gurgling noises and arrested gasps told him that she and Leonnatus had both struck true.  A second later, she reformed at his side, a trail of blood droplets on the floor marking the path of her withdrawal. 

Ptolemy moved past him, setting one hand on the hatch and pulling it all the way open to show Leonnatus looking around alertly, ignoring the remains of guards at his feet.  Waver released a slow breath at the sight of it, bracing himself as he and Thaïs followed her husband into the hall and the smell of blood filled his nose.

 _No kill like overkill, is there, Kayneth?_ he thought distastefully as he glanced over the Grand Guignol afterparty of severed limbs. _But that sets the tone nicely, anyway._

The corridor outside stretched out in both directions, railed on one side and forming a large box that overlooked a wide factory floor.  Dust-mottled glass panes in the roof streamed in sunlight, the girders of the ceiling marked at intervals with bare light bulbs.  Down below—well, even if he hadn’t been a magus, with all the spotty access to technology that entailed, Waver doubted he would have recognized the machines lining the floor.  They were hulking, graceless things, thundering rods and sliding blades, nightmares of the Industrial Revolution.  None of it matched the hot, compressed chamber they’d just spent the last several hours baking in; even the slope-edged hatch looked different from this side, a full-sized door reinforced with metal strips and a radio speaker placed at head height to one side.

“Well, now, wizard, where to?” Thaïs asked with a subtly bloodthirsty lilt, fire kindling in her open palms.  Waver turned his attention to the group.

“Back to the castle,” he answered firmly.  “It was built on top of a node, and we know it’s where Rider was last.  I’ll check the leylines on the way just in case they’ve moved him, but if they’re using him as some kind of _battery,_ that’s where he’ll be.  We’ll have to move fast; we don’t want to get dropped right into another cell.”

“Will you be able to defend yourself as you check?” Leonnatus asked, eyes flashing to the stairs, the ceiling, the broad bay doors below.

“Not until we’re almost right on top of the node.  I can count on you three until then, right?”

“Need you ask?”  Ptolemy moved his robes aside to draw the hook-bladed khopesh he’d adopted in his time ruling Egypt.  At Waver’s grin, he waved to the railing.  “Then let us make haste.”

-

The angry thudding was becoming quite distant now, Oxyathres thought through the haze of exhaustion.  There had been no further contact from the outside, neither from captor nor comrade.

_I’m sure they’ll come in due time, my friend.  But likely not soon enough for me._

With effort, he turned his head.  Across the chamber, Alexander snarled and lifted his broad spada again.  With a quick shriek of metal, he sliced one lamp off the wall from their cell and set to hacking at the hole left behind.  Oxyathres watched for a few moments, rendered placid by the prana drain of the room, if such was truly the culprit behind the lack of feeling in his extremities and the curious hollow sensation in his chest.  They were the same numbness, he realized, or had become so, spreading and overlapping until they’d become one.

_Not much time now.  Ah, do not let me die with your back turned…_

“Iskandar…” 

Perhaps the man could not hear him over the din of the Sword of the Cypriots being thrust against a one-inch gap of metal.

“ _Iskandar…_ ”

Still the king labored, shoulders shifting and circling beneath his cape, its color rendered a brilliant flame in the yellow light.  His lips compressed together in a tight line; he focused relentlessly forward.  Oxyathres caught back his breath, readying himself. 

“Iskandar, you childish buffoon, come _here!_ ”

_Do not let me die alone because you cannot watch—!_

He lay gasping for breath as the racket ceased.  Alexander looked back at him with a wounded expression and stricken eyes.

“Come here,” the Persian repeated, quieter but still insistent.  “Do not make my death more pitiful by overlooking it in your selfish grief.”

The king looked rebellious but came to him, sitting down cross-legged and setting his sword aside.

“I can only _be_ selfish,” he rebuked, folding his arms.

“And now petulance?”  Oxyathres chuckled weakly.  “Asha Vahishtā, you will rob this of all possible dignity, won’t you?”

“I do not calmly accept the loss of one of my best allies!” the Macedonian retorted, throwing up his arms in frustration.

“The people I allied you to are ages dead.  You must look to the future now.”

“You are irreplaceable.”  Alexander spoke bluntly, still unaccepting, and placed one hand on the prince’s arm.  Oxyathres shook his head fondly. 

"Iskandar, my good friend, humility does not suit you.  You made an ally of me while you were at war with my own brother.  I think it will not be hard for you to find new—”

“ _You are irreplaceable!_ ”  The room spun wildly as the king seized his arms and pulled him upright, roaring in anger.  “ _You_ , Oxyathres—my friend!  So silence your damnable humility!”

“…Ah,” the smaller man managed once his ears had stopped ringing.  “Yes, I see.”  He sighed deeply, his head dropping forward against his intent. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “For failing to keep you from here.  And for leaving you…” 

 _The lights are dimmer…  I am fading…_ Though it was distant, he could still feel the strength of the king’s arms pulling him close. 

“The fault is the traitors’, not yours.  I will see you avenged, Oxyathres of Persia.”  Acceptance weighted down Alexander’s words, but with it resolution.  His companion smiled approval and laid one hand down over his wrist. 

“Mm,” Oxyathres agreed.  “That is to the good.  Satisfy your grief with their most fervent regret.  But after you have done so, rest easy.”

His eyes fell closed, but waiting in the darkness he could see the rest of his words laid out before him like the steps of a garden path, and after them a great cavernous silence, a limitless space of solitude and reflection.

_But I have no regrets.  I will cross the bridge—for now._

“I will return to you, my king.  When you have restored the desert, I will find my way there.  There is no power that could keep me from your side.

“That is…  My legend…”

-

Eumenes trailed at the back of the procession, watching everything he could.  The palace they had come through before had transformed in subtle ways, as if the rifts in the city had settled in and widened.  Rooms were less cluttered and ornate, the interiors warmer and brighter, the furniture less overstuffed.  In particular he noticed the lights—in the old castle, lanterns had boxed in low-burning teardrops of flame, while the newer was marked by wired fixtures, most of them shaded to mask the bright glare of the glass bulbs within.

The architectural shift had changed the layout of the place, from long straight halls to steep tumbling stairways, but to his best guess they were headed outward rather than inward.  The guards surrounding them were edgy, uncertain, Perdiccas’s Noble Phantasm still in full effect.  Eventually they’d get to an officer who would try to issue a command, at which point Eumenes expected the already tenuous order would completely break down.

He eyed the weapon the guard in front of him carried against one shoulder—shaped something like a finely carved branch, a shining wood surface tipped with rings and metal fixtures, most prominently a long tube inlaid along the top.  It looked like nothing he’d ever seen so much as a particularly glorified tool for blowing darts, but far too impractically shaped, and lacking a hollow throughway.  He disliked the alien nature of it; he couldn’t plan for a weapon whose use he didn’t know.

 _Their marching order is sloppy,_ he thought _.  Possibly just Perdiccas’s influence, but more likely a lack of practice.  These are guardsmen, not soldiers, and even with that they’re unpracticed.  Not used to the prisoner escort?  Then others before us haven’t been so much trouble, and the city’s peaceful._

They passed on out into a courtyard; overhead, the sky shone like aquamarine.  Loose straw sacks on posts, target rings on the left wall, and the low building across the enclosure told the story clearly enough.  _Barracks,_ Eumenes thought.  _This is about to get messy._

He flexed his fingers in preparation, gaze flicking over to Hephaestion.  The commander faced forward, expression not visible from Eumenes’s angle, but his left hand hung calm and still at his side—too still for a natural gait.

_Soon._

He eyed the group around them and began calculating in his head how many men could be assumed to be inside the far building.  A large palace to be defended, but staffed for peace, not wartime.  _Not an insurmountable number for four Heroic Spirits, but with the cavalry scattered,_ _better met with Roxana or Alexander’s chariot,_ he thought, gaze following the guard who ran ahead to the barracks.  _But this close, Perddicas’s Behest should still be effective.  It’s a small battlefield._

He looked at Hephaestion’s hand; the blond had closed it into a fist.

_Ah._

Eumenes bowed his head, drawing in a long breath and releasing it.  The slow exhalation carried his essence with it; he remained materialized, but felt his presence drain out of the world.  A face in the crowd.  A no one.  A background servant.  A secretary in the company of great kings.

The knife no one expected.

Alexander had frowned at him disapprovingly when he’d found out about Eumenes’s class, all that time past when the desert had first formed and his followers had been reunited under his banner.  It had lasted until Eumenes had explained his victory over Craterus, the king’s most accomplished general.  At that, Alexander had laughed, suddenly more impressed than angry.  Even with the revived general himself there glaring, it had been a perfect moment. 

Eumenes opened his eyes and stepped to his right, out of the ring of guardsmen.  They didn’t so much as bat an eye.  From the barracks, the messenger was emerging with a taller man, older, his uniform more decorated.  He carried one of the strange weapons loosely in his right hand, and wore a curved blade belted at his hip.  If not a commander, then certainly a captain of some degree, the secretary supposed as he moved unseen across the courtyard.

The man’s face twisted with shock as his gaze settled on the waiting group.  He whirled on the guard who’d fetched him and rattled off, “You idiot, what in the hell are they doing out?  Bring them to the council room right away!”

Chaos bloomed like a late summer flower—weapons lifted to the guards’ shoulders in staggered time, salutes were made and faltered, and the circle around the Hetairoi fragmented as everyone in the yard heard different orders.  As the confused voices rose and spread, Hephaestion, standing in the center of it all and smiling with a slow satisfaction, summoned his longspear into his hand.

“Clear the courtyard.” 

What ensued could hardly be called anything so organized as a battle; the Hetairoi leapt in three different directions, each to a better position for their own weapons, as the enemy commander went on bawling nonsense at his bewildered men.  Iron flashed and wooden shafts flew; guardsmen staggered and fell as quickly as they could gather their senses, and still Eumenes watched, observing the speed with which the guardsmen’s projectiles flew and the deafening sounds of their use..

The captain stared around at his men’s disarray, himself unharmed—of course, none of Alexander’s men would galvanize a troop response by killing a wildly ineffective leader whose every order heightened the confusion.  But the man wouldn’t be an officer without at least a modicum of sense, it seemed.  He accosted the nearest guard and shook him by the collar, shouting an order into his face; when the other quavered back a repetition of what he’d heard, the captain’s face clouded with suspicion. 

Releasing his underling, his gaze scanned the crowd: Perdiccas, tucked into a window frame firing one bolt after another; Hephaestion leaping between engagements, longspear whistling and whirling; Peucestas, spinning in place, the holy shield deflecting every blow aimed at him as his sword flashed out and retreated. 

The captain made the logical choice.  The empty end of his weapon drew a bead on Hephaestion’s golden head.  Eumenes lifted his right hand, concentrating.  He narrowed his eyes at the long dagger forming out of shadow behind the captain’s back.  In the middle of a melee, with so many eyes that might see, wasn’t an optimal use of the Noble Phantasm, but—

A voice edged with controlled panic cut through the mayhem to the secretary’s ears as, at the edge of his vision, a young guardsman struggled against the outflow of guards from the barracks, trying to push his way through.

“Someone get to the radio!  We have to report this to Lord Bertram at once!  The prisoners have escaped!”

Eumenes’s hand turned downward and closed; across the courtyard, the blade taking aim at the captain rippled and vanished.  Eyes fixed on the young man, he pressed forward, gliding after him and through the pressing crowd like a windblown length of silk. 

Inside, he moved to the side of the doorway and watched as the boy stumbled to a boxy metal shape, covered in dials and sprouting wires like vines; the soldier picked up one component and began turning knobs, working the strange machine’s controls.  It began to click and hum. 

Eumenes flicked out his hand again and the young man staggered forward, eyes widening in shock as the blade plunged to the hilt through the back of his neck.  As blood welled along the dagger’s edges and ran down its length, he dropped against the device, which squealed a scratchy protest at the impact.  His fingers scrabbled weakly at the edge of the table before he fell sideways to the ground.

The secretary sighed as the magic concealing his presence faded with the attack.  A glance towards the barracks hall showed it empty; from outside, he could hear Hephaestion calling a rally.

“Come, companions!  We find our king!”

Two steps took Eumenes past the dying boy; he summoned his long twin daggers into his hands and glanced down at the device on the table, which crackled and spat with patterned clicks.  No time to linger and try to make sense of it, though.  He drove a blade into its center with one thrust and quickly exited.  Outside, the enemy captain was slumped against the barracks wall, cursing and gripping at an arrow sunk deeply into the upper right side of his chest.  Eumenes moved past him in a fleet jump to join the others at the castle entrance.

“What were you killing back there that was more important than the man aiming at the king’s right hand, Eumenes?” Perdiccas asked he met them beneath the arch and fell into a run.

“Communication with their commander,” his friend answered, clipped.  “But he’s been alerted that something’s happened.  Their guard will be raised soon.”

“Then lets see if we can communicate some ourselves before they pick up our trail,” Hephaestion called over one shoulder.  “Can you find our way back, Peucestas?”

“It will take time, commander,” the darker soldier answered.  “We approached from a different angle, and the building itself has changed.”

The blond nodded and chose a door at random to throw open.  The others followed him into what proved to be a simple linen closet, likely one of dozens, and Eumenes slid past them to the back of the room, his daggers evaporating from his hands as he knelt and folded back his long sleeves.  Peucestas and Hephaestion lurked by the door together with Perdiccas standing watchfully over the secretary as Eumenes swept one hand over the floor, composing messages in his mind.

_Your Highness, are you still trapped?  We make our way towards you.  Please respond._

_Lysimachus, have you found a way out?  Is the queen safe?  Please respond._

_Ptolemy, Oxyathres reached us.  Are the rest of you unharmed?  Please respond._

All three missives burned against the floor for a few seconds, then abruptly one of them whisked away like scattered sand.  He looked up to Hephaestion.

“Ptolemy is free,” he whispered, dismissing the missives that remained stubbornly fixed to the floor.  A moment later, as the commander moved to his side, a reply scribed itself across the polished wood.

_Coordination, thank the gods.  Headed towards the center per wizard’s lead.  We’re not yet pursued—it would be helpful to stay that way once back to the castle.   -P_

Hephaestion’s dark eyes narrowed in thought as he read.  Eumenes waited, hand poised over the floor.

“Tell him he’ll have his distraction.  If Waver’s got a way of tracking down Alex with his magic, they won’t be running around in here blind like us.  We’ll buy them some time and a lower guard.”  The blond stepped back over to the doorway, glancing out and down the hall.  “We’re headed out—all the way out,” he said, gesturing them up, then looking back at Eumenes sharply.  “ _Warn them about the floor._ ”

Eumenes nodded simply and gestured.

_Ptolemy—_

_We’ll be outside the walls soon.  Keep watchful.  Barracks are on the eastward wall; the king is beneath a large room with many windows and a trapped floor.  Be careful of their weapons; their bolts fly faster than an arrow and with far longer range._

He stood and moved to join the others, glancing at the return message that appeared on the wall by the doorway as they gathered at the door of their hideaway.

_W says high chance they control the surroundings.  Don’t get pinned down.   -P_

Eumenes thought back to the youth trying desperately to relay his situation through the strange device before the dagger had gone through his throat.  He filed the thought carefully at the front of his assessment of their opponents as, ahead of him, Hephaestion pressed one fist to his heart and closed his eyes. 

Since they’d been children, Alexander and Hephaestion had been inseparable; even as grown men, there was no one who understood the king’s heart as clearly.  So complete was his understanding that Hephaestion above all others had been empowered to act as Alexander’s representative, his words carrying the same weight as those delivered by the king himself.  All of Hephaestion’s authority was such: tied to the king and no other.  There were times, the secretary knew, when it galled him.  But there were also times when it became advantageous.

Eumenes stepped back with the others to give Hephaestion room as he donned the king’s mantle.  Blond hair reddened, sun-flushed skin darkened, and the width of his shoulders grew heavy and stubborn as those of an ox; as the king’s double strode out into the hall, red cape flaring, even the scent was the same, olive bine and leather and the faint siren call of ocean salt breeze. 

-

“He really is powering the place,” Waver said, kneeling next to Volumen Hydragyrum in her maid form.  One of his hands rested over her wrist; her fingers splayed out across the ground and melted away into filament wire streams gliding over the ground, around corners and walls, keeping to cracks and recesses.  “It’s the same as the desert—if you know his prana signature, you can feel it everywhere.”

“We’re still headed for the castle, then?” Ptolemy inquired from where he lurked a few yards back from the alley entrance.  The word _ῥοή_ glowed azure on the ground in front of him.

Waver stood and watched as the distant silver lines converged into a band leading towards the palace that briefly gleamed in the sunlight before receding in a flash to reform the last row of knuckles on his Mystic Code’s hand. 

“I think at this point we can assume that until we’re standing outside the gate,” he confirmed.  At his mental cue, VH dissolved into a sphere and rolled attentively at his side.  “It’s weird; on a normal leyline system, the power would be converging _into_ a node, but here it’s—”

“Stop,” Leonnatus said suddenly, tilting his head.  “Did you hear—?”  As the others turned to look at him, he glanced around and leapt skyward, catching a window sill on the building they’d been sidling along and propelling himself up to the roof. 

Waver stopped moving and pressed himself back against the wall, closing his eyes and focusing his attention on listening.  In life, that kind of concentration had only benefitted magecraft, but as a spirit it had a broader application.  At first, only the chatter and rustle of street noise greeted his ears, but a few seconds later a distant cracking retort filtered through, the muffled echoes of gunfire and, faintly, the sound of a scream. 

“I hear,” Ptolemy said, voice remaining low and amicable as he opened his eyes.  “They’re out, then?” 

“What is that sound?” Thaïs added in, her hands cupped delicately around her ears.  “In amidst all the shouting, that—boom, boom...”  She tapped two beats on the ground with one foot to emphasize the onomatopoeia, emphatic and drawn out.

“That’s the weapon Eumenes warned us about,” Waver answered, looking up the wall after Leonnatus.  “I don’t know much about the history of firearms, but it’s probably some kind of rifle.”  A memory snaked through his mind, the shadowed interior of a blood-drenched water tank and the falling clatter of a dagger thrown faster than he could see, deflected perfectly by Rider’s sword in spite of the heavy darkness.  Could he move that quickly now as well?  He’d never had the chance to try.  He grinned a bit to himself—it would have made the old him gawk and curse, but now the prospect was a little bit exciting.  That was Rider’s effect on him, to be sure.  Though, with VH out, he wouldn’t be able to test his limits yet; she’d been fast enough to deflect bullets even in life, much less as a Noble Phantasm. 

“As long as they keep on their toes, I don’t think they’re in any real trouble from it,” he concluded as Leonnatus dived back down to them like a stooping falcon, producing no sound in his descent save the whisper of moving air. 

“Now’s our chance to cover some ground.”  The soldier jerked his chin up.  “They went over the back wall.  We can approach from the west while the enemy is busy fortifying the gates.”

“I concur.  Let us see if we can make haste enough to catch them before Perdiccas’ ignominious influence has faded.”  Ptolemy’s mouth hooked up devilishly at the corners and he gestured to Volumen Hydragyrum questioningly, raising his eyebrows at Waver.  The magus nodded and stepped onto the mercury’s responsively-flattened surface.  Ptolemy followed and the Mystic Code bore them up at the peak of her rising dome as Leonnatus and Thaïs scaled back up the wall. 

No one on the streets had noticed the sounds of fighting yet.  _But they will soon.  They’re headed our way_ , Waver thought, squinting at the distant figures that appeared at the crests of erratic, showy leaps—one noticeably broader than the others, the ends of a cape billowing out from its shoulders.  Though the sight tightened his heart involuntarily, he shook it off.  If Rider had been freed the messages would have been completely different, and he’d have felt it in the leylines beside.  The largest figure could only be Hephaestion, exercising his right to act as the king’s double, and doubtlessly confusing the hell out of the guards in the process.

“That must be Hephaestion,” Thaïs said aloud, echoing his thoughts as she peered at their far-off companions.  “So no king.  Does anyone see Oxyathres?”

“Hephaestion, Eumenes…  Perdiccas…  Peucestas…”  Ptolemy listed off their compatriots one by one, spotting them by the sweep of their hair or the shape of their arms.  “No.  No prince either, it seems.”

“He’ll be with Alexander, then.  Well, he’s doubtless happier that way,” his wife concluded.

Waver frowned, one hand moving unthinkingly towards VH, which extended outward to meet him eagerly.  He hesitated. 

 _He_ can’t _be with Rider; all the power’s coming_ out _from the node and I didn’t sense any of his prana.  But—do we have the time to check again?  Mini-Reality Marbles against his Noble Phantasm…_

He caressed his hand through Volumen Hydragyrum and withdrew, eyes narrowing.  Wherever the Persian was, speed was still the best answer.

“Hephaestion, Eumenes, Perdiccas, Peucestas,” Ptolemy murmured again, eyes intent.  “No, that will not do.  I think, my friends, that I will go and join our colleagues.”  He smiled as they all turned to look at him, Waver surprised, Thaïs and Leonnatus gauging.  “I’m sure they can lead some of the guards on a happy enough chase, but a true distraction ought to be—a little more eye-grabbing, I feel.”

“You’re sure that should be you and not me, then, darling?” Thaïs said with a grin, swirling a gout of fire between her fingers. 

“Quite sure, my beloved.”  The old general nodded.  “In the castle, my traps would only draw attention where we want it well away from this branch of the rescue effort.  With the other group, they will not only keep the guards’ eyes turned outward, but also draw more of them out—for far more of them will die in pursuit if they must cross over _my_ grounds.”

Thaïs laughed at this and moved fleetly over to cup one hand around his neck, briefly pressing her lips to his cheek and whispering encouragement.  Leonnatus nodded at the assessment.

“Take your toll of their number and let it be high, then.”

“Nothing less, for our king,” Ptolemy answered glibly, squeezing Thaïs’ hand before facing the palace with an aquiline stare of eager intent and leaping away across the roofs. 

“…So do we wait for the first flame strike, or go now?” Waver asked as he watched the old man leave. 

Leonnatus shook his head.  “We press on.  Keep low and behind cover as long as we can.  Distractions or not, they’ll still have guards posted.”

“Then lead the way.”  Thaïs gestured him forward and fell in behind him.  Waver followed suit, keenly aware of the silver arc that followed him across the roofs as they angled towards a different approach.  Even ducking behind the gabled windows and miniature towers dotting the rooftops on the city, he felt too exposed. 

Not long after, a plume of black smoke began to rise lazily up from the streets in the distance as Ptolemy’s figure joined the others.  Something else climbed into the sky as well, though, the engines’ flat whine reaching Waver’s ears at the same time as Thaïs gasped.

“Airplanes,” he told his companions grimly.  “Like I talked about on the train.  Come _on,_ ”  he added as the other two halted, staring at the crafts—three biplanes like in the old movie documentaries, the fixed wheels of their landing gear just visible against the blue.  “If they’re getting eyes in the sky the roofs aren’t going to be safe for much longer.”

Leonnatus nodded belatedly and Thaïs shook her head, murmuring, “That the dream of Daedalus should be turned against us…”

 _I really hope we get there before I have to explain tanks,_ Waver thought, and they moved on, watching as the planes circled wide and dipped back towards their other companions, which were leading the pursuit eastward.  Faint spangles of light highlighted the pilots’ guns firing, driving the Hetairoi apart.  People who could very well nearly leap tall buildings in a single bound were hard to steer, though, as the first pilot to buzz too close to Hephaestion-as-Rider must have learned when what appeared as a short spada shot out and, three feet past the tip of the blade, an invisible spear head carved a deep furrow into the underside of the plane. 

Perdiccas and Peucestas leapt from building to building, weaving around one another as Perdiccas’s arrows fanned out into the planes’ wings, the archer defended by the shieldbearer.  In reality it would have been laughable for the arrows to even penetrate given the physics involved, but Waver frowned at the airplane’s lack of so much as a wobble at the assault from a Heroic Spirit’s weapons. 

_This doesn’t make sense.  It isn’t even Victorian anymore, just a mishmash of anything kind of old-timey.  You didn’t even get really flight-worthy planes until World War I, right?  What the hell kind of spell do they even have on this place?  And if they can change it that easily, then what's even real here?_

Across the city, a deluge of water opened up in the sky in a sudden downpour as a plane dipped across the airspace of a building Ptolemy must have marked; _that_ drove it downward into a steep descent, hundreds of pounds of water dumped across its surface.  The old general’s tasseled cloak marked a dark flag against the sky, triumphant. 

And then the world warped, the steeple on which Ptolemy stood gaping open like an alligator’s long mouth, mass and the general falling away into the center before it snapped shut and solidified again into a tall corrugated obelisk, white as a church steeple.  To his side Waver heard Thaïs hiss.  They landed on the manor nearest the castle’s western wall and for a second he thought he or Leonnatus would have to prevent the blond from going to her husband; she stared at the new structure on the city’s skyline and trembled. 

Just as he reached a reluctant hand up to her, though, she turned her eyes away and pressed her back to a gable.  Her eyes burned as she looked up into the sky, whispering a curse—not just an off-the-cuff collection of expletives, but a proper hexing, an invocation for the gods to rend the city’s foundations and return them to the sea, to mark the survivors for their crimes and curse them to wander hostile roads.

Waver forced his gaze away from her and the prison that had caught Ptolemy anew, lurking behind the gable and turning his attention to the castle.  As he’d thought, now that they were this close, he had no need for his Mystic Code to sense the node.  He could feel it on his skin like the determined press of a current; with his circuits open to assess it, he could taste Rider’s prana suffusing the air, a tang of blood that clung to the back of his throat.

The castle’s layout had altered, pulling in tighter and stacking up higher, fewer halls and more towers.  Still the highest point, at the back of the building one dome sat above the rest like an observation deck; sunlight winked on the panes of the dark windows encircling the high chamber.

“That’s the node,” he said, utterly certain.  “We won’t even have to go through the building.”  An ireful grin teased up his mouth, humorless and past the end of his patience.  “Just look at all those easy-access windows.”

Thaïs peered past him, one hand on his shoulder, and mirrored his smile, a knife into the heart of all her enemies. 

“We’ll be using Volumena, then?” she queried.  “Even for us that’s a bit of a jump.”

VH lifted her arm in a mimicry of the Hetairoi’s spear-raising salute to Alexander, a flash of enthusiasm visible in her silver-sculpted eyes, and beamed.

“The more direct the better,” Leonnatus said, watching the summit.  “They will not miss our approach, if the dome is our goal.”

“Then come, friends!  Let us go forth and _crush_ _it_.”

Waver hooked Thaïs’s elbow in one hand as she moved to step out of cover.

“There’ll be people waiting,” he reiterated.  “Can we talk strategy for thirty seconds, please?  If we blow this there may not be a second go-round.” 

“Little enough to discuss with only the three of us.  Four,” Leonnatus added with a glance at VH.  “Break the glass with your familiar, wizard, then follow me in.  Put down what opposition you must to reach our king’s cell; Thaïs and I will guard your back after that.”  He shot their blond companion a look.  “You will keep an eye to the room as a whole.  Be mindful of reinforcements.”

“And the trick floor,” Waver added in a grumble, scowling.

“Anything else?”  The hetaera gave them an expertly put-upon look, one hand resting on her hip as it canted out to the side.  Leonnatus released a faint sigh of admiration and shook his head.  Waver resisted the urge to rub the bridge of his nose or flinch as Thaïs turned a brilliant smile on him. 

“ _Defensio,_ VH,” he ordered, turning to his Mystic Code.  “Then platform us up on my signal.”

The mercury girl curtsied delightedly and dissolved into her spherical form.  Leonnatus darted for the edge of the roof and dove off without hesitation; his companions followed.  The yards between them and the wall melted away beneath their leaps; the magus watched Leonnatus’s back, only partly hearing the sudden chorus of shouts and gunfire as they reached the wall and scaled it.  VH boosted him over the last few feet and then they were past it, cries of soldiers fading behind them, and nearing the steep walls.  Waver grabbed a last steadying breath and jumped.

He wondered if it was how gymnasts felt, or free-runners, moving from one point to the next in smooth succession—though Leonnatus and Thaïs smoother than him, he was certain—finding purchase on the smallest of ledges and outcroppings, propelling oneself faster and faster towards an end point, and there it was, the last gap, far too broad for even Leonnatus to clear, and _there_ was VH in the moment of gravity reasserting itself, rising up beneath them like a wave.  He pointed at the rapidly approaching tinted glass and gasped out the command.

“ _Scalp!_ ”

Volumen Hydragyrum whipped forward and slashed through the detestable barrier ahead of him with a sound like wind screaming through a cracked window.  The three dived as their support slid out from under them; Waver caught a last glance of Thaïs alighting on the glass exterior, her hands catching at the thin metal framework as he and Leonnatus landed inside with rolls and crouches, the glass falling like cracking ice sheets around them. 

The noise inside reverberated in the very air, a dull, constant rumbling produced by a massive turbine standing at the center of the room connecting floor to ceiling; within it, steel blades nearly two feet across turned with a lazy inevitability.  Cables as thick as Waver’s wrist ran across the floors and up the walls to vanish against the dark glass.  The dissonance of it all set his teeth on edge; the room bespoke technology—dated technology, but manmade devices, mundane things, while every circuit in his brain screamed _magic!_

Standing at a bank of controls attached to the base of the turbine, the old man glared at them with cold eyes.  Reposed and waiting a few feet in front of him, Alyssa Fredinham closed the breech on a hunting rifle calmly.  Her purse sat open at her feet, discarded.  She looked up at Waver, tilted her auburn head, and smiled through a sigh.

“You know, for a moment I really panicked when I saw the king and his lot out on the streets,” she said conversationally.  “‘How could he possibly have escaped?’ I wondered.  But then the details started to add up.  The city’s guise was still intact, and there was no Hephaestion with the group, no Oxyathres—but there was Ptolemy, who I know had been with you, Lord El-Melloi II.  It’s a spell of yours, yes?  Clever enough to fool the guards—well, they’re good enough for Vendavale, but they’re not experienced troops.  They’ve never had to be, not in their lifetimes.  But I’m a different sort, and not so easy to trick.  It was a good show, but shall we get it over with?  I’ve a date with friends to get back to.”    

 _We can’t get it over with fast enough,_ Waver thought, the words sharp and white against his clamoring fury, and pointed forward.

“Scalp!”

As Leonnatus and Waver followed Volumen Hydragyrum farther into the chamber, the old man’s hands darted across the controls; the floor distended upward abruptly and the mercury crashed into it, sending tile and dust flying.  Leonnatus’s head twisted up and to the side, leaping away just as the shells from Alyssa’s weapon impacted on the floor where he’d been standing. 

“Wonderful speed!” Alyssa pealed.  “Can _you_ move so fast, wizard?”

For a split-second, he stared down the barrel of her rifle before VH whirled into defensive formation.  The firing blast filled his ears with a roar and the surface of the mercury rippled, and then his stomach dropped along with the rest of him as, beneath his feet, the floor gave way.

The Mystic Code scythed downward in a curling wave; he landed in a crouch as she bore him back up.  In the room, Leonnatus was dodging shots in leaps like Waver hadn’t seen since he’d watched Saber fight Caster’s monster on the surface of the Mion River—dives and rolls and bounds that carried the soldier to walls, to the light fixtures on the ceiling and back to the floor, an agility so honed that it seemed to leave him unbounded by gravity. 

VH’s movement caught Alyssa’s eye; she spun and sighted at Waver again as, behind her, the portion of the wall on which Leonnatus stood shot out like a pile driver, sending him into a spinning dive.

In the few heartbeats’ time as VH enshrouded him, he released a breath, letting his thoughts run clear and cold. 

_None of this technology is real.  It’s just what they want us to see.  She’s leading, and he’s coordinating his attacks to support her.  We can’t get close as long as he’s buying her time to shoot at both of us.  But we’re not all-in yet._

_All we need is for Thaïs to get a clear shot._

As the mercury receded he broke into a run, coat flapping around him as he headed for the right side of the room, skipping and hopping over the scattered cables.  A rifle shell whistled wide past him; Alyssa turned hurriedly back as Leonnatus dove in toward her back.  Behind him, Volumen Hydragyrum extended into a silver wall; Waver met Bertram’s glare and grinned viciously as he reached out one hand and touched her surface. 

“Scalp!” 

Silver and dark steel impacted, blocking his view of the old man; the roar of sound and smoke formed a cloud across the room, a roiling and impenetrable gray against which the flickers of orange sparks arcing across the gap from the shattered windows glowed like a festival lantern at dusk.

Waver was already pelting towards the turbine when Bertram screamed, the light of flames spinning kaleidoscopic patterns through the clouds of plaster dust and smoke.  Another shot from Alyssa shrieked past him, neatly deflected by VH, and he emerged from the chaos to slap a hand on the turbine as the butler staggered back from it, his clothes alight and his skin blistering in Thaïs’s fire. 

Sometimes it was just the basics that felt the best.  He braced his weight on the machine with both hands and snapped one leg up, placing a foot on the old man’s chest and shoving him backwards into the smoke.  Quick, efficient, and unexpected—he remembered watching Rin break someone’s nose with that kick. 

Her form had been better, of course. 

He turned his attention to the controls as Volumen Hydragyrum swept up around him in a dome.  Rider’s power coursed under his hands, rich and red and with heat enough for all the world.  But where it should have rejected all boundaries, flowing untamed and wild to envelop everything in its reach, instead it ran strictly up through the turbine and into the cables, led and channeled by something else. 

The other power felt old, cool and strange; it reminded him of the darkness between stars, of ivy-grown abandoned houses, of droplets of water falling past detection into the depths of a well—order and inevitability, the chains of physical laws, the inescapability of action and reaction.  For a moment he quailed at the strength of it, certain that he had nowhere near enough power to disrupt such a weighty absolute.

He took another breath and splayed his hands across the control panel. 

_Magic works under the same laws.  So does the Throne of Heroes.  And so do I._

He closed his eyes and began to chant.

“ _Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure, with a heart within me patient of affliction._ ”

Power stirred and answered from within: memories of his life, of the deeds he had performed and what he had been known for, of what those who knew his name remembered when it was spoken.

“ _For already have I suffered full much—_ ”

The destruction of Fuyuki’s Grail system in a war that had drawn the Mages’ Association and the Church into open conflict for the first time in centuries.  The explosion at Mount Enzou that had rocked the entire city, shaking people awake in their beds and drawing them to stare at the volcanic cloud of dust, shards of stone, fragments of trees and the ancient wooden beams of the shrine.  His studies on the effectiveness of rote repetition and improved finesse on the output from a mage’s circuits, the countless pages of data that had been denounced by his peers but studied voraciously by his students until the old magi at Clock Tower had looked around them and realized just how far Professor Velvet, Lord El-Melloi II’s influence had spread, and how it would affect the future more deeply with every passing year.

_“—and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.”_

A boy that stole a relic, and in doing so brought down a man six generations his better.  An unending, unceasing ambition that would acknowledge no barrier as too high to overcome, no tradition as too proven to question.  Disruption of order.  Rejection of the status quo. 

“ _Let this be added to the tale of those._ ”

No resignation.  No despair.

Somewhere far away, all but lost in the throbbing rush of blood and prana circulating in his system, a woman screamed.  He opened his eyes and reached _through_ the array, dials and gauges melting away under his touch until his fingers closed on smooth stone.

_Sorry if this hurts, Rider._

“Tidal Flux!”

-

The chamber shuddered and rocked.  Philip looked up from where he sat in the cramped cell; Roxana lifted her head from his shoulder as Calanus and Lysimachus separated and stood in a flash.

“What’s—?”  Even as Lysimachus spoke, the stones in the walls began to tremble and crack.

“Cover your eyes,” Calanus suggested, and ducked into a crouch as their prison shattered, the fragments of masonry dissolving into nothingness even as Philip protectively raised his arms and pulled the queen back against him.

“Physician, let go,” she commanded, tugging at his arm in annoyance and stepping back to look around as sound and light washed back into the world in a white glare.

Lysimachus whistled as the group stared.  The beautiful city they had strolled through before lay broken and fragmented before them.  The sky above brooded an ominous gray, and the bright walls of the buildings had faded under mottled stains.  The streets resembled an ill-assembled puzzle, the paving stones changing shape and direction in lines as patternless as cracked clay.  The evenly placed lanterns now lay toppled or replaced with opaque glass spheres which burned from within like small suns.  Some noxious smell hung heavy in the still air, irritating Philip’s throat even as he breathed it in.

“Apologies, Majesty,” he managed belatedly. 

They had reappeared in a place that bore little resemblance to the scenic park plaza they had been wandering through when the road rose in strips around them and boxed them up like market fare.  Where it had been nearly empty, now people crowded thickly in the streets around them, crying out in dismay and all at odds with one another in their attempts to come out of doors, flee back within, or make any headway through the teeming throng.

“We should get to higher ground,” Lysimachus said firmly and leapt to a doorway, a windowsill, and then the roof.  Roxana followed.  Philip, in their route, spared a sorrowful glance for the woman on the stoop who had fallen over at Lysimachus’s sudden appearance and now stared up at them in tearful shock.  He paused long enough to touch her shoulder, though she shrank away from his hand.

“You should take your family and leave this place,” he told her softly, “for I do not think my king will be kind to this city.”

Not waiting for a response, he followed the others, Calanus trailing him up.  Awaiting them, Lysimachus was shading his eyes and peering across the city in the direction Roxana pointed, towards a destroyed building and the fire raging at its foundations.

“The castle group,” the queen explained as the other two men joined them.  “But not in the castle and not with the king.”

“They must have separated him,” Philip mused, frowning—he could pick out the perfect circle of Peucestas’s holy shield, its hammered silver emblem flashing in the firelight.  “But what—”

A yellow-white corona burst out of the corner of his eye, the loud crack rising above the noise of the crowd.  He jumped away on unthinking instinct, capping a curse as the missile grazed his arm.  By the time he’d looked down, an arrow had already sprouted in the throat of the soldier below, courtesy of the queen.

“It hit you?” she asked, turning away with her polished bow in hand as Lysimachus took her place and scanned the streets for others.

“Just barely.  I’m afraid I’m not the warrior the rest of you are, Your Majesty.”  He pulled his hand away from the wound, a shallow but ragged gash across the muscle.  It stung and pulsed with pain and he released a short sigh, pressing his fingers over it again and visualizing treatment—water to cleanse, stitches to close, a bandage to mind and time to mend.  “No worries—it’s an easy thing to fix.”

She nodded at the healed injury and looked back across the city.  “Lets join them and find Alex, then.”

They made quick time across the city, keeping to the roofs to avoid bouts with the scattered and dismayed soldiery.  On the horizon, the permutations of storm clouds blurred into a featureless gray curtain.

 _The fog again,_ Philip thought, heart sinking.  _Back where we started, after all this?_   He looked back over the patchwork buildings and chaotic streets, brows drawing down with his frown.  _There’ll be no saving the place._

Hephaestion and the others stood watching a smoldering hulk the size of a small elephant.  Splintered wood blacked and smoked between stretches of hammered metal; Philip smelled flesh burning as they approached—a man with his legs hidden within the long tube, the blood from his broken frame streaking the strange craft. 

Perdiccas stood scowling at the wreck, but looked up as they approached.  Bloodstains marred his clothes beneath jagged punctures in his armor.  His stance favored his right side, one hand clapped over a particularly dark stain beneath his left shoulder.  In the uncertain, ephemeral light, his cheeks seemed pallid, expression pinched.  He opened his mouth to speak, but swallowed the words at the meaningful glare from the physician.  Subsiding, he allowed the older man to guide him to a seat on the upturned stones of the street as the rest of the Hetairoi closed ranks around them.

“So this is the true face of the place?” Lysimachus asked, a troubled shadow of guilt lining his brow.

“Yes and no.  Likely Waver’s doing,” Hephaestion replied with a shake of his head, “or so our secretary thinks.”

Philip shut them out, focusing on Perdiccas’s injuries.  Mostly surface cuts like the one he’s taken before from the enemy soldier’s weapon, they scattered haphazardly over the man’s frame.  In the deepest, though, he could sense the foreign object, some hard fragment of metal, smaller and more narrow than an arrowhead, and lodged against a rib.  Tricky, but then, he had pulled an arrowhead out of Alexander’s lung years ago with only skill and hope, and the memories of humanity were far more generous than that.

“What on earth happened?” he murmured, setting Perdiccas’s arm over his shoulder and holding it there with a light touch as he pressed his other hand gently to the wound.

The other man’s eyes narrowed and Philip felt his fingers twitch, the spasm jumping down the muscles of his arm as the injury began to close, the metal fragment pushing itself out.

“Firearms on wings,” he answered tightly.  “I am _very_ ready to leave.”

“Good timing,” Roxana put in.  “Because Alex just walked out on top of the keep.”

“You can’t miss the cape,” Hephaestion agreed, following the queen’s stare.  “Lysimachus, Calanus; you two go ahead.  Flag down Ptolemy when you see him.  Roxana, keep a watch until we’re done here.”

Philip closed his eyes and drew more deeply on his power, until he could sense Perdiccas’s hurts as if someone had mapped them across his own skin, a bile-yellow awareness flashing beneath his eyelids.  Water, stiches, bandages, time.  The hard, sure reach of forceps and the inexorable push of the body’s own work. 

 _My magic feels different._ The words came into his mind as a steady, detached observation, quiet but as clear as the scratch of pen on papyrus.  _There’s none of Alexander in it.  Then, if he is too weakened to support me, I should save my strength for him._

Metal touched his palm, warm and slick with blood.  He cupped his hand and let the missile fall into it, running a thumb over Perdiccas’s punctured skin.  The general pulled back, releasing Philip’s shoulder and rotating his arm twice.  He nodded and stood. 

“Good enough to move on.  Lets go.”

-

Hephaestion’s leap brought him to the top of the wall and he moved to Alexander’s side, joining his friend in surveying the city.  Fires burned in broad arcs sweeping east, the mark of Ptolemy’s passage before he’d been caught in the city’s traps, and the fog crept ever closer, silently engulfing the distant edges of the city in a tightening ring.  Collapsing buildings ran ahead of the border, roofs sliding onto the streets and walls crumbling under their own weight, looking like toy houses whose edges were coming unglued.

Bertram lay unconscious a few yards away, guarded by Eumenes’s watchful stare.  His fine black clothes were tattered and scorched, his skin blistered and swollen from the heat of flames.  The other members of the Hetairoi gathered on the roof behind the king; Hephaestion watched them counting their number and sizing up one another’s injuries.

“Bucephalus?” he asked his friend quietly.  Alexander’s eyes closed and he smiled, a proud curve that twisted at the edges with bitterness.  It looked as though he was standing through willpower alone; his shoulders were slumped, his arms crossed in preference to them hanging limply at his side, and every so often he swayed in the still air.  He spoke in a voice which dipped into a rough, sweet sigh.

“Kicked down the walls and bolted.  There’s never been a cage made that could hold her.”

Hephaestion glanced out at the fog again, trying to imagine the huge mare galloping through it.  His friend was right, of course—Bucephalus had only one Noble Phantasm, but it was absolute.  She could only be caged by her master, and there had only ever been one man fit to make that claim.

“She’ll be all right,” he said with calm surety.  “There’s nothing we ran across on our way that would stop her for long.”

The king nodded silent agreement.  After a moment his smile faded and he gave answer to the smaller man’s hanging, unspoken question.  

“Oxyathres has died.  That _thing_ took too much of him.”

Hephaestion’s eyes followed the glance to where Waver crouched on the rooftop.  A heliotrope cube nearly six inches across sat on the floor in front of the magus, who was tracing a magic circle around its sheared-off corners.  Splatters of red stood out starkly against the stone’s mossy green surface, curls of blood floating in old, algae-dark waters.  As he watched, Waver tapped the surface and muttered a word under his breath.  The circle flared red and in the stone’s depths, almost fully obscured by its native coloration, an answering light sparked and swirled like a candle moving behind a painted screen. 

Waver drew back, a quick, sharp breath drawn through his nose, then his eyes narrowed and he bent back to his work, altering marks on his circle with deft slashes of his long fingers.  Hephaestion looked back to his friend.

“Oxyathres told me to satisfy my grief with their regret,” Alexander rumbled angrily.  “But whatever I do doesn’t matter; the place is collapsing anyway.” 

Hephaestion nodded at the assessment, glancing out again at the encroaching fog.  Alexander glared at it, seething, his friend knew, with the weight of the journey facing them anew and the city breaking apart at the seams for reasons that had nothing to do with the edict of punishment he wished to personally render.  Hephaestion sighed quietly at the typical self-centeredness of his friend’s narrow focus.

“Waver did this,” he reminded the other man, “and anything carried out by him is done in your name.  _You_ have ended this place for what it did to you.  You know that, Alex.”

“It isn’t enough,” the king growled, eyes burning.  “They must _remember_.”

 _I think they’ll remember it well enough while they’re scattered and lost in nightmares_ , Hephaestion thought, but aloud, suggested, “Then leave them a curse.  You have someone who can.”

Alex turned long enough to look down at him, anger fading slightly before puzzlement.  He pointed a broad finger at Waver, tilting his head with a severe look.  Hephaestion shook his head and set his hand on Alex’s wrist, tugging it to the left.  Alex followed the corrected angle and his eyes cleared with understanding—and, more importantly, concurrence—as they landed on Calanus.

The sage, who’d been watching the skyline impassively, glanced up as the two looked at him.  He met their stare for a few seconds, long enough to register the unspoken summons, and approached as Hephaestion silently wrapped Alex’s arm over his shoulders, leaning in to take a measure of his weight.  His friend gave him a peevish look but didn’t pull away.  It caught the attention of the others, who fell silent to watch: Eumenes stepped a few inches to the side in order to keep both Bertram and the king in his field of vision, while Waver banished the circle with a gesture and turned his attention to the coming judgment. 

“How can I serve, great king?” Calanus asked in his clear voice, standing unbowed and ready.  Alexander nodded toward their prisoner.

“An execution is too clean for the man who killed Oxyathres of Persia, but we have no time for tortures.  Yet I won’t leave him at our backs to spearhead a regrouping.  Calanus, give him a death that lingers.”

“I understand.”  The sage nodded.  “I will return him to the wheel.  Lysimachus, sit him up.”

The other soldier obeyed, moving up behind Bertram and lifting him up into a loose sitting sprawl, holding his shoulders.  At the ungentle hold, the old man winced and pried open his eyes.  The group watched as the sage moved in front of him, looking over one shoulder at the collapsing city and then down at their enemy. 

“Whatever you think your choices were, to manipulate the good faith of guests is a terrible crime.”  Calanus spoke quietly as his black sword took shape in his hands, his eyes dark with a quiet pity tempered with resolution. “Have you any defense for it?” 

Bertram looked up at him, face drawn in pain and alarm raising in his eyes as his gaze traversed the scene—the sword, the state of the city, the freed king and the gem in Waver’s keeping.  He struggled briefly in Lysimachus’s grip then stilled.  His eyes closed, the corners of his mouth drawing down into a scowl of miserable resolve.  Hephaestion shook his head to himself—arrogance and despair were a killing combination, as he had cause to know. 

“Very well.”  Calanus straightened, his voice raising into a more formal volume and cant.  “This sword was forged to defend those who shared my faith.  Carrying it, I stayed hale and healthy for over fifty years.  But it failed me when I left my home.  Age found me, and illness.  The sword has carried that curse ever since then.”

He raised the blade up to shoulder height in a studied, ritual movement as he spoke, both hands wrapping around the blade as one bare foot circled out behind him fluidly.  He had maimed men with that stroke before, Hephaestion knew, and that had been as a man over seventy; in Alex’s dream, he existed in his prime, poised between a young man’s boldness and an old man’s wisdom, the most ageless existence in the Hetairoi, for all that even in his human life he’d been the most impulsive member of his sect. 

“It is called the Hand of Kāla, she who is darkness and time, which is the death of all things.  Wander, betrayer of your hearth, and know that your death has been summoned and sped on its way.” 

The Indian’s arms moved in a tight blur and with them the sword’s curse.  Though not a mage, Hephaestion could still feel its weighty passage, a doom shifting like a distant storm heralded by the changing wind.  The old man, white-faced, stared down at the red line opened by the blade over his breastbone. 

“Someone put him on the street with the rest,” Alexander said, turning away in scorn.  “We’re leaving.”

Perdiccas stepped up to join Lysimachus as the white-haired soldier scooped the old man up roughly and dove off the keep’s roof with him, heading towards the castle wall.  Perdiccas followed, glaring around at the city that had set them back so badly.

The others gathered quickly.  Waver traced a circle beneath the heliotrope, which dropped into it with a ripple of light, the circle closing again over it.  Roxana padded over and looped her slim arms around Alex’s waist.  He sighed gustily, giving her a hangdog look, and hugged her back with his free arm. 

“We’ll look for honey and wine,” Hephaestion said to them softly.  “We’re overdue for a rite for the fallen.”

Alex hummed a sad agreement.

The streets through the city had emptied a great deal by the time the company returned to them.  Curtains had been drawn over the windows in the shattered houses, or else doors hung open and abandoned.  The people remaining looked less human now, fleeing before the Hetairoi with alien cries on the tongues, the limpid cast of a pale sun coloring their skins lavender and shadowing the starkness of their thin features.

“They weren’t from Earth,” Hephaestion heard Waver mutter to Lysimachus behind him.  “Judging by what was in their library, they were from a lot farther off.”

Hephaestion looked sideways at Alex, whose shuttered expression suggested that what interest the conversation held for him was still subordinate to his grief.  The prospect of whole other worlds ought to have excited him, but… 

“If the place is a spiral, we have a good chance at catching up to Bucephalus, at least,” the blond offered after mulling over the situation for any positives, but Alex only hummed low in his throat, eyes far away, and his friend fell silent.  Better to give this a while, he thought.  Alex could brood like a cliff face and time was the best remedy.

And he was entitled to it now, if ever.  Oxyathres had been a rare friend, and the path to Dream looked lonelier than ever, compared to the existence they’d become accustomed to.

The fog grew thicker as they walked, obscuring the buildings and Vendavale’s scattered citizens, and carried with it the silence, oppressive and plucking at memories of suffocating fever and wracking chills.  Hephaestion drew closer to Roxana and the determinedly plodding Alex, trying to put the thoughts out of his mind.  His death had been bad enough in itself; being made a liar by it was worse, and knowing in his bones what it had done to Alex still hurt to think about, a thousand years on.

_Of all the legacies for a man to leave…  Damn this fog…_

Movement in the mist ahead of him—he focused dully on Roxana as she paused mid-stride, head raising.

“That light…”

The rest of the company slowed, squinting into the gray at what the queen’s archer’s eyes had spotted first.  Just as Hephaestion had begun to register the distant white circle slowly brightening in the fog, the sound reached his ears—a long, mournful cry like a signal horn, fading out at the end as if with uncertainty.

The screaming of the train’s brakes followed after and the Hetairoi formed ranks, a half-dozen voices suddenly raised in shock as they stared at the behemoth.

“ _Waver_.”  Alex’s voice cut a gash of silence through the chatter.  The wizard ducked past Peucestas and Ptolemy to stand at the king’s shoulder, peering between him and Roxana at the train as it pulled to a stop barely ten feet in front of them.  “What is it doing here?”

Waver stared at it in clear bewilderment, brows knotted.

“Fucked if I know,” he answered at last, blunt and dubious.  “It’s not like—wait.”  He rummaged in his coat pockets and pulled out the stub of his train ticket.  “…Anyone else still have theirs?”

Hephaestion removed his hand from Alex’s wrist to reach beneath the edge of his red outer chiton.  Summoned by his thought as swiftly as his spear, the rough grain of paper met his fingertips.  A glance around showed the others likewise pulling out the proofs of passage given to them at the station before.  A long moment passed as the group distrustfully watched train doors open, broken by the low-voiced, hesitant observation from Peucestas.

“Well…  We _did_ pay to be taken to the center.  Maybe—we just got off too soon?”

The group looked toward Alex, who glared at the owl-headed conductor as it stepped out and twisted its head at them expectantly.  Pulling himself away from his wife and friend he strode up to it, seized its collar in one hand, and lifted it four feet off the ground as he held his ticket out in front of its face.  Hephaestion winced, flashing back to the disaster with the Oracle of Delphi.

“The Dream Lord’s castle,” Alex demanded.  “Is that where we’re going?  If you take us astray again I will have a pillow stuffed for my wife with the feathers from your wrung neck.”

The conductor thrashed in his grasp, human hands clawing at unflinching muscle, and squinted at the writing on the ticket.  When the king repeated the destination it blinked down at him and nodded rapidly, two quick, restricted bobs of its white pate.  Alexander stared at it for several long seconds, then looked over his shoulder at his followers.  Eyes too clear, face set, he tilted his head up slightly before ordering in a calm voice. 

“Everyone get on.”  At least one person behind Hephaestion must have opened their mouths to protest, for the king’s gaze flashed over the group and he finished, slow and dire, “Don’t question me.”

The group obeyed.  Watching in concern as Alex set the conductor back down, Hephaestion felt a small hand grasp his; he looked down into the queen’s green eyes.  She squeezed his fingers once, her expression a plea, and he nodded, squeezing back.  She let their fingers rest together for a moment longer then raised her head into an imperious cant and strode away, parting the companions like a warship amongst fishing skiffs.

The blond watched her leave appreciatively, remembering the same determined passion hammering artisan-skilled through her fleetness and grace when he and Alex had first seen her, a princess of a defeated people who yet danced for their conqueror with her intent fixed squarely on the future.  Then and now, a blessing.

He turned his attention back to Alex, who stood apart, watching the fog with forlorn eyes.  Hephaestion read the wish on his face as clearly as one of Herodotus’s histories: a rebellious neighing and the proud tossing of a black mane; an ominous, heavy tremolo of hoofbeats.  He joined his friend as the others boarded; the two stared out into the ethereal remnants of Vendavale’s spires and watched them slowly collapse in on themselves one by one, noiselessly, like defeated prayers.  When feathers and cloth ruffled behind them, he turned a molten glare on the conductor, which shrank back, its neck ruff puffing out defensively large.

He gave it a few moments more, until the last steeple had been devoured by the grey mists, then gently took his other half’s hand.

“Come on, Alex.”

The king’s head dipped, lips trembling through a convulsive scowl, but he finally turned away, broad fingers closing around Hephaestion’s in a painful spasm.  The commander drew him onto the train and through the milling numbers of the Hetairoi to one of the sleeping compartments, giving his fellows one last forbearing glance before he closed the door.

Outside the train sounded another long lamenting cry and, slowly, began to move.

-

They passed through no city this time, no cobbled streets and shops, no streets of teeming crowds.  Only the blur of white gates had passed by before the train came to a wailing stop outside of a vast, glittering castle, the architecture of its design as foreign as the shimmering stone of which it was formed.

 

 _Well, it’s different at least,_ Perdiccasthought grudgingly as the companions filed off the train and craned their heads up to stare at the place’s high parapets.

“It’s huge!” Lysimachus burst.  “Fit for the gods.”

“I have never seen finer,” Ptolemy agreed, shading his eyes.  “And I have seen many grand estates.”

“Mm.”  Eumenes’s unconvinced noise turned all eyes towards him.

“What is it?” Perdiccas asked, joining him in order to get the same angle of vision on the place.  Alexander had rested and brooded for fully half of the journey—they were _not_ going to have another Vendavale Heights on their hands if there was any way to foresee it.  Indeed, Hephaestion still lingered in the train’s doorway, delaying the conductor with small talk.

The secretary lifted one black-clad arm, pointing to the castle’s barbican gate.  Two pedestals adorned the walls on either side of the stone arc.  They stood empty, but above them—a chill slid down Perdiccas’s spine as, curled lazily on the third pedestal, a monster bigger than a bull elephant lifted its long head to stare down at the company.

“A dragon,” Eumenes said quietly, “and two empty places.  In Vendavale, they were filled with a griffin and a hippogriff, but only painted around the entrance.”  He looked up at the taller man solemnly.  “In imitation of this, perhaps?”

“Then where’ve the other two beasts gone?” the general asked, frowning, to which query Eumenes only shrugged and shook his head—unwilling, Perdiccas knew, to guess blindly.  “And weren’t we told we would pass two brothers?”

“That we’d know we were on _course_ when we passed two brothers,” Roxana corrected, approaching Eumenes’s other side and peering curiously at the watching guardian.  “But we did pass through gates, like Aristander said.  Why don’t we go ask it if we’re in the right place?”

Perdiccas glanced back to where Alexander was ducking out of the train, appraising the castle with a thoughtful eye.  He caught his follower’s questioning look and nodded; Perdiccas bowed to him swiftly and turned back to the others.

“Lysimachus, Peucestas; accompany Her Majesty,” he ordered.  “Leonnatus, rear guard.  Thaïs, with me.”

The hetaera moved to his side diffidently, her neatly clasped hands resting at her waist as a dancing illumination glowed behind her white fingers.  He called a bow into his hands, the horn recurve of the king’s infantry archers hard and strong to the touch for all the weapon’s namelessness. 

The dragon watched with a telegraphed indifference as the visitors took formation and approached; when the queen hailed it, it replied in a voice like the draw of the tide before a wave large enough to crush whole cities.

“Stand back or be devoured.  There will be no entrance to the castle of the Dream King.”

 _Arrogant enough for royalty,_ Thaïs murmured, her smile hooked and amused as Roxana challenged.

“We’ve no need to enter, not if we’re truly at Dream’s palace.  After all, there’s no king to receive us, is there?”

“You have the right of it, small morsel,” the beast replied, laying its rust-red head down on its crossed forelegs.  “So think not of audience nor pillage and be gone.”

Perdiccas felt the turning of Alexander’s attention with the hair on the back of his neck—nor was he the only one, to judge by Philip’s pained look and El-Melloi’s palm rising to cover his eyes.  The still air seemed suddenly more watchful, and far sharper.

“We think of only one thing,” rebuked the queen, with an accuracy that would not have been half so true at the beginning of their long journey, “and that is the _finding_ of your king.  It’s to everyone’s benefit that we know when he left and what’s become of those who went hunting for him.”

“None have returned who undertook the journey.”  The guardian stared down at Roxana and the others with pale, inscrutable eyes.  “You, like all other true subjects of the king, must have patience and await his return.”

Alexander moved past Perdiccas in a sweeping gust of desert air and warm leather scent, Thaïs’s whisper of, “The beast is in despair, and does not hide it well,” caught and tossed away in his wake.

“None have made the journey who are Alexander!” the king bellowed, half indignant, half boastful, and fully challenging.  “I’ve sworn no fealty to Morpheus, and I’ll not sit and wait like a boy whose father’s away at war!”

 _Did you ever?_ Perdiccas thought, drawing his arrow slightly more taut as El-Melloi grimaced.

“You will—!”

“Wyvern, please compose yourself.  We do still represent the master in his absence.”

The voice rose from a shadow behind the gate, quelling the beast’s rise.  The height of the man who followed it out dwarfed Alexander’s, ever Perdiccas’s, yet it was a pine tree’s height, thin and straight and rigid.  He dressed much as Bertram had—a fact which gave the company no cause to relax grip on their weapons—all close-cut, severe black touched with white cuffs and collar.  Brown hair stood out from his head in three wild tufts and round glasses perched at the end of his steep, straight nose; he gave the companions a weary look over the silver frames.

“I’m afraid the guardian is correct, however,” he went on.  “Frankly, with the Dream King gone, the castle is simply too dangerous to house guests.  I do apologize, Your Majesty, but if you were to try and room here, there is every chance that by morning your chamber would have simply detached from the castle entirely and floated off into the Dreaming.”

Alexander looked disgruntled, folding his scarred arms.  He gave the newcomer a measuring stare.

“And you are?”

“Lucien, keeper of the library of Dream.  I’m sorry that you’ve come all this way for nothing.”  The thin man pressed one long, gnarled hand over his chest and bowed.

The king put his head on one side.

“is the Dreaming sealed?” he queried.  “Can you tell us of no way to leave?”

Perdiccas watched the emotions play out over the librarian’s face—uncertainty, a tentative hope, an internal calculus that brought one knuckle thoughtfully to his mouth, which he opened, closed, and then opened again, speaking slowly.

“We can’t properly receive you, but if you would like, I can have food brought.  If you honestly mean to leave the Dreaming in search of the master, there are issues that should be discussed.”

Alexander made a placating gesture at the companions.

“I do everything honestly!” he declared.  “Where do we begin?”

-

They began, it seemed, with a feast.  Overseen by Lucien’s shrewd eye, the long table was laden down with food like the companions had never seen.  Some if it was identifiable by El-Melloi—“Sushi platters,” “Goat or something, I think,” “Fried chicken? Really?”—but a great deal of it was foreign even to his futuristic eye, strangely formed fruit, oddly proportioned roast, or pastries that carried sensations of unfamiliar memories of floating red spheres on strings against backdrops of whirling lights. 

Perdiccas ate little of it, watching the others discuss matters with the librarian. 

“Eve was right; none have returned who went to search.  But those who left are mostly dreams.  They move through the world—somewhat sideways.  The lot of you should be somewhat more sustained by the Throne of Heroes.  Perhaps you’ll be able to act more directly.”

Lucien, sitting awkwardly at the king’s right hand, paused and raised a goblet of wine to his lips, taking a measured sip.

“On the other hand,” he went on, “you should know that passing through the Gates is not the same as being summoned by the Holy Grail.  You will not be manifesting as your own individual spirit selves, but rather as the dream of the Ionioi Hetairoi.”

Hephaestion, sitting by Roxana on Alexander’s other side, tilted his head.

“So what does that mean, exactly?”

“Heavens, I couldn’t say,” the librarian demurred.  “But dreams like that can manifest a bit strangely.”

The king grinned at the thin man, lean and intent.  His wife gave the expression one look and translated, “The Hetairoi’s conquered everything it’s ever come up against.  How can if fail now?”

“Exactly right.”  Alexander nodded smugly.  “We leave after the meal.”

Perdiccas looked down at the table, the words an iron weight set in his heart.  He closed his eyes and drew in a silent, steadying breath.

_It must be now.  Before he’s so absorbed in the venture that he’ll spare no time for delays._

He stood.  The conversation quieted all along the grand table as the companions’ eyes turned to him.  Eumenes alone looked unsurprised, eyes grave.

"Your Majesty, I request permission to remain here.”

 The king, cup half raised to his lips, stared at Perdiccas over the rim before he drew a swallow and set it down, eyes narrowed. 

“Why?” he asked levelly. 

“Because someone should.  Your followers are devoted to you above all else; surely others will reach this castle in due course.  Someone should be here to rally them when they come.” 

“You think we will take that long to find Morpheus?”

“I do.”

Alexander went on staring at him, even as he leaned to his left to hear Hephaestion’s whisper.  Perdiccas’s lips tightened, and he allowed his fingertips to rest on the tabletop so that none could see their faint tremor.  Curse that man’s too-perceptive eyes…

“Come with me, Perdiccas.”  The king stood in a sweep of red; the general breathed out and nodded gratefully. 

The two walked away from the bedecked table, some ways down the steep path that lead towards the tall white gates.  The companions went on staring until Thaïs’s voice broke the silence, cheerfully asking the librarian about his collection.  Alexander lowered himself to the rough ground and patted the dust beside him.

“What’s this really about, Perdiccas?” has asked as his friend sat down beside him.  The general hooked one arm around his knee and looked away.  Alexander waited, patient with friends in a way he so seldom was with anything else.

“It…”  Perdiccas begins slowly, unable to meet his eyes.  “It involves my second Noble Phantasm.”

“…I didn’t know you had a second Noble Phantasm,” the redhead blinked, surprised.  He nudged the taller man with one elbow, a studied half-grin on his face, and asked, too gently, “You’ve been holding back with us?”

“It would never have mattered in the desert.”  Perdiccas stared fixedly away as he stumbled over the words, lips thinned with tension.  “It—It is something I know of myself.  It relates to—my life—the path my life took after your death.”

Alexander’s smile faded.  The course of his companions’ lives after his own ended was seldom spoken of in the desert, for what meaning did those decades of petty wars and squabbles _have,_ there in a realm outside of time built on the loyalty they all shared?  Just as with Ptolemy’s library, however, there were times when the legends of his warriors were shaped more by their lifetimes after him than before.  Perdiccas strove to gather words to himself, words that could be dispassionate and reserved and not breaking with the burden with self-disgust.

“‘Rise to Glory.’”  His voice quavered and Perdiccas cursed himself.  “When I began my career, I was nothing but a captain of one of your many units of infantry.  But thanks to my friendship with you, by the time of my death, I was regent over the whole of your empire.  Rise to Glory emulates that rise, and the fall at the end of it.  Were I to be summoned into the real world, it would be as a lesser power to begin with, but I would grow rapidly stronger.  At the heights of it I could crush most opponents, but in end the power would drive me mad.  Thatis the legacy my actions have left me.”

He turned his face into his wrist, bitterness harsh and aching in the twisted corners of his mouth.  Beside him, Alexander was silent for a long moment, mulling it over, before speaking in a slow, wheedling voice.

“But we will go through the Gates, not the Throne.  We can’t know that your Rise to—”

“We can’t _know_ ,” Perdiccas interrupted, chest tight, shaking his head as he looked back towards his leader, eyes still dropped.  “But there is no stopping that Noble Phantasm once it has begun, and if it were to activate, I would have—a week, two at best, before I would be beyond reason.  I cannot endanger you and the mission in that way.  Please leave me here, and I will do everything that I can to—”

The touch of his friend’s hand to his knee silenced him and he resisted for only a moment when Alexander reached over and lifted up his chin, forcing Perdiccas to meet his eyes.  The king looked upon his anguish gravely and nodded acceptance.

“Thank you, Perdiccas, for honoring me so highly.  You will be positioned here to gather my men to my banner.”  He broke into a childish grin, tweaking his friend’s jaw.  “And perhaps some new followers, yes?  I would like it if I could return to the desert with new companions.”

Perdiccas caught the ragged gasp of relief in his throat and nodded; as he had with the distraught Lysimachus at the train station, Alexander pulled him into a comforting embrace, content to wait until he regathered his wits. 

Perdiccas leaned against his king’s strength, releasing an unsteady breath, his long arms hanging limply in his lap.  Behind them, the feast carried on, though even at this distance he could feel the weight of loyal Eumenes’s attention.  He sighed.

“All I left to the world are memories of conflict,” he said softly.  “Forgive me for failing you and the empire so thoroughly.”

Alexander’s arm tightened and Perdiccas only had time to blink as his king’s other hand swung around, middle finger folded back beneath his thumb, before the flick caught him squarely between the eyebrows.  He hissed with pain and annoyance, rubbing at the stinging mark on his brow, still caught in the crook of the bigger man’s elbow.

“No apologies, Perdiccas.”  His friend’s declaration was cheerful, but underlaid with iron.  “That you are with us is proof enough of your worth.  Our time in the world is long past and the true mark of what we left can be seen back there.”  He extends his free arm back towards the table.  “Friendship and loyalty beyond death!  Look upon it and be glad!”

The general sighed, levering at the grip.  “That is your mark on the world, Alexander, and would be with or without me.”  The great arm tightened and he slapped at it in submission.  “But I can’t see it past your bulk, so let go!”

Alexander laughed loudly and, at his side and at the table, his followers smiled.

 -

Fed and energized, the companions gathered at the white wall.  The two gates awaited, one of horn and the other of ivory, towering above them in size.  Prana flowed through them in silent, streaming rivers, so powerful that it was all Waver could do to listen to the last words being exchanged between Rider and Lucien. 

“We’ll do what we can to keep him comfortable,” the librarian said, looking uncertainly at the general standing beside him.  “Do be careful.  I would hate to have to explain to Akasha what happened to such a large group of her heroes.”

 _…Maybe I’d be better off not listening,_ Waver thought, staring at the gates as his brain balked, _if what I’m going to hear is him talking about the Root like a tetchy neighbor._

“See that you do!  And in return I will bring your king back to you!” Rider declared with, of course, complete confidence. 

“Be well, Perdiccas!” Roxana called with a wave.  “Tell the others we’ll be back in no time!”  The tall general smiled at her and lifted his hand to them in farewell. 

Alexander beamed and turned toward the gate of horn.  He strode toward it and planted one huge palm on the door, pushing outward. 

Waver caught his breath as the flow of prana redoubled, sweeping around him like living wind, stronger than any leyline he’d ever traced.  A hand touched his shoulder steadyingly and he gave Philip a grateful look.  Swallowing, he dipped his chin and walked forward with the others into the flow of the world. 

END PART ONE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'd think that, for all the time I've been writing fanfic, I'd have learned not to make promises about updates. Sorry for the long wait, everyone; this chapter took a lot of planning and hung me up with bridging scenes for days on end. Anyway, with the Dreaming arc over, the Hetairoi at last moves into the real world, to find...? Look forward to it! As ever, I have side stories in mind, but tend to get hung up in writing the main bulk of the arcs, we we'll see how things go.


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